


Somebody Help Me

by DeadBetty



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Break Up, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Enemies to Lovers, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, I don't know if I'm writing Jim as a psychopath we're gonna find out together, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, Kidnapping, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Murder, Mystery, Pining, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Texting, Violence, i don't understand tagging etiquette I'm a mess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2020-01-15 12:05:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 40,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18498604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeadBetty/pseuds/DeadBetty
Summary: "His doctor, and he used the term loosely, had recommended a more regimented schedule - specifically one that included regular, nightly sleep. He’d recommended less drink and fewer physical altercations. But then how much could you entirely trust someone tied to a chair and bargaining for their freedom? When he recommended regular exercise, Jim was forced to say, “Murder would be the next Zumba if more people survived it,” and honestly he hadn’t gotten much out of John Watson after that, at least nothing terribly coherent."NOT Johnlock





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly expected this to be a one-shot but it just... keeps... going... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> FYI: E rating only starts at chapter 8. Before that, I'd been calling it T.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> However the heck you make this program indent at paragraphs is completely alluding me.

Jim’s heart was pounding at a heightened and irregular rhythm. He crossed the street towards Piccadilly, chuckling to himself about the task at hand, and a little bit about his own waning health. To survive shooting yourself in the mouth only to develop a heart murmur was a little bit hilarious.

_It’s the mundanity that’s going to kill me, Sherlock. You’d really think hostage-taking would be more interesting. — JM x_

He’d sent the text the night before, when he’d been a little bit drunk, and a lot angry, and surrounded by far more subordinates than he’d ever wanted in one room together. Twelve. That was twelve thugs who now knew his face, and each other’s, and who might now panic at any loud noise like a herd of gazelles.

Of course, Sherlock had written something back along the approximate lines of ‘Where’s John? blah blah blah.’ And every text like that he didn’t answer meant another, more furious, more adamant text, accusing him of psychopathy despite how serene he was actually being. He eventually ended up dropping his phone in a beaker of acid to shut it up.

His doctor, and he used the term loosely, had recommended a more regimented schedule - specifically one that included regular, nightly sleep. He’d recommended less drink and fewer physical altercations. But then how much could you entirely trust someone tied to a chair and bargaining for their freedom? When he recommended regular exercise, Jim was forced to say, “Murder would be the next Zumba if more people survived it,” and honestly he hadn’t gotten much out of John Watson after that, at least nothing terribly coherent.

He walked along towards the park, the full sunlight blaring against his sunglasses, his coat beginning to feel superfluous. Christ, it was supposed to be winter for a few more weeks at least.

London had no business being so cheerful and bright. It was almost obscene to witness all the people who’d come outside, like earthworms on the sidewalk after a rain, insects turned out from under a log.

He watched for the black car to pass him twice, then pull over just ahead. He waited until he was inside and en route to open the new burner phone.

He typed:

_Your doctor is extremely alive, could you please not annoy me so much today_

He deleted it and entered a new number entirely before typing:

_Are you with him? JM_

They rolled through the city, his new mobile silent in his lap. His noticed, vaguely, that his driver was a woman, and that she was executing a very thorough series of loops through the city to be certain no one followed. She did this with no precise direction from him, and in fact she didn’t look frightened of him at all. Good. He couldn’t take another gazelle. He frankly couldn’t.

They were back in the city center more quickly than his other drivers could’ve managed it. He would’ve preferred the opposite, strictly speaking, but that was just weakness clawing at his chest. He refused to give it any more space. He knew what he had to do. There were worms, insects and gazelles, and then there was him: an injured, feral dog.

The car stopped in front of a high-end boutique, a purveyor of fine shoes and handbags.

“Don’t go far,” he said, waving his hand vaguely. “This might go any number of ways.”

He was back in the sun a few seconds later, and his phone chimed a few seconds after that. He ducked inside the boutique, nodded at the cashier, who quickly hit a button behind the register, releasing a lock. He proceeded through a pair of ornate double-doors, into a stock room, past a wall of shoe boxes and through another door.

It led to a side-alley filled with garbage cans and several doors opening exclusively from the inside. It was fenced-off, not in a way that would mean much to anyone looking to get inside, but it was empty and dark. He looked at his phone. Irene had written back.

_Hmm. I do believe he’s somewhere around here but the brother is being rather domineering at the moment so it’s been difficult to keep track. Might be losing my phone in a moment, darling. Kisses. IA_

Jim growled slightly and tucked the sunglasses in his breast pocket. That brother ruined fucking everything. Three dots were apparent under the text, and he felt with certainty that it wasn’t Irene regaling him with one of her lurid tales.

He tucked the phone away. Mycroft could wait and Irene could handle herself.

He walked almost the length of the alley before knocking three times on an unmarked door. It opened a moment later. One of the gazelles had a black eye.

“Jesus,” he grumbled, pushing past into a darker dark than the alley. He felt certain the doctor was somehow to blame. The walls were black velvet, torn in places. Every other sconce had a burnt-out bulb. He went through two doors to find the sound-proofed room with John Watson inside.

John sat on a large, claw-footed chair. The chair sat on a raised platform, around which several more less ornate chairs were scattered. One of identical make stood against the wall behind him. From the look of the place, it used to be some kind of theater, or a sex club, or possibly an intricate combination of both.

John was tied to the chair, in several places, but he’d somehow broken the left arm while Jim was away. It must’ve been no easy feat. He was at that moment struggling openly to free his right wrist as a handcuff jangled from his left. A sweaty man in a white tank top stood nearby looking dumb.

“Boss— he,” the man said, haltingly, once he finally noticed Moriarty. “What kind of doctor — ?”

Jim let him just stutter for a moment, and when it became clear no explanation would be forthcoming, he snapped irritably, “Oh my god, Elliot, just go watch youtube videos with your brother.”

Elliott passed him, looking sheepish, on the way to the door. Jim growled, “And keep the radio on.”

John had stopped struggling, his eyes now locked on Moriarty, once again with the odd expression of someone convinced they’re looking at a ghost. He’d had even more trouble than Sherlock accepting he was still alive. It was almost cute.

“Using their names,” John muttered to himself, once the door closed again. He seemed dehydrated, which made a lot of sense, really, since he’d been offered no water.

“They’re also not wearing masks,” Jim added, gamely. His eyes flashed, and he said, mockingly, “What does it all mean, John?” He pulled a toppled chair off the ground and sat down, out of John’s reach. He was where the audience would’ve been, if John’s struggle with life were a very dull play.

“Oh Christ, this is - ” John passed the free hand over his eyes. Such a struggle to gain its freedom, and now he used it to communicate fear and despair. When they weren’t covered, his eyes were wild. Jim wondered how he was remaining conscious.

He pulled the phone from his pocket. He made no attempt to hide his boredom as it sank down on him like honey. “Let’s see what brother dear has to say,” he muttered.

Mycroft had written, at long last, a very terse text from Irene’s phone. It was short for having taken so long to compose.

Jim read it out loud, soft Irish lilt disappearing as he assumed an eerie impression of Mycroft: “Miss Adler insists you do not plan on killing your hostage. While I would find the insistence naive or duplicitous from perhaps anyone else, I tend towards believing her in this instance, at least, insofar as you must now recognize we have a hostage of our own. - Mycroft Holmes.”

Jim rolled his eyes as he returned his gaze to John, who was putting on a very good show of having given up.

“What should I say back?” he asked.

“That you need heart surgery and you’re in love with his brother,” John answered quickly.

Jim laughed loudly. Then his face faltered again into an empty stare. His mouth smiled unhappily as he read aloud: “Hello, Mycroft. Do be a dear and advise Sherls his doctor is much cleverer when deprived of fluids.”

This time the response was almost instantaneous, and Jim had to imagine the scene at Irene’s house had turned rather chaotic. The message read:

  
_I don’t want him clever. I like him stupid. NOW GIVE HIM BACK_

  
“Not even signed,” Jim grumbled to himself. He watched the three dots appear beneath the text, then disappear, then reappear, then disappear. “Well, he called you stupid, John,” he intoned. “Which is generally apt.” The dots appeared and dropped away again just as quickly. “Christ, Irene’s poor phone.”

“Can I just remind you, once again,” John said, with evidently a great deal of effort to restrain his tone. “That I am actually not a surgeon, which is what you’ll actually need in a few days’ time if you keep ignoring your symptoms.”

Jim shrugged, not looking up from the phone. It continued to flash dots at him, teasing him with thoughts of Sherlock typing something terribly unwise and scathing, probably while Mycroft quite wisely shouted at him about not poking a bear.

“Still,” Jim finally answered. “I bet you could do it with a gun to your head. I tend to win those sorts of bets.”

“Well my hands tend to shake,” John said, sharply. “Or haven’t you done your research, as Sherlock would say?”

Jim shot John a brief, scathing look. “Don’t presume to know what Sherlock would say.”

Just then a long text appeared. It read:

_First of all, as I have told you many times in the past, my name is not and has never been “Sherls.” Second of all, I assume you know Irene would come to no harm if the situation were entirely in my control, but regrettably that is not presently the case. My brother is already arranging for her transfer to prison under charges of obstruction of justice and harboring a fugitive. I think you’ll agree I’m being entirely civil to the point that my brother insisting on reading this through before sending it is fucking ridiculous and infantilizing and I am not high I have been clean for months. -SH_

Jim’s heart pounded painfully, and rather irregularly, as he read through the text, this time to himself. Honestly, he’d expected it to be Mycroft pretending to be Sherlock, but Mycroft couldn’t have duplicated _that precise bitchiness_ , no matter how advanced his skills at subterfuge. It made him feel faint, and hysterical, and a little aroused, and even mildly angry at himself. He held onto the emotions until his extremities felt numb with it.

Jim started typing a response, leaning intently over his new phone.

John laughed sardonically. “Oh good, he’s talking to you then. Of course he is. Say hi for me, won’t you,” he bit off the last words and roughly shook the chair he was confined to. It held fast. However he’d managed to break the one arm, he seemed unable to duplicate it.

Jim furrowing his brow in irritation, stopped typing as he pinched the bridge of his nose to think. There was a lot he wanted to say, but it would’ve been nice to say it without Mycroft and likely Irene reading it too. In the end he decided to just cause more chaos.

_Oh, darling. Irene has no idea where I am and is therefore harboring nothing. Your brother’s just an authoritarian twat who takes hostages and calls it law and order. Tortures us, too… Hmm… Maybe I should take a note from his book now, seeing as he’s so endlessly proper and good. Oh, and Johnny boy says hi ~ JM_

Sherlock was chewing on his thumbnail as Mycroft read the text aloud. He blushed ever-so-slightly at being called ‘darling’ in front of his brother, but all things considered it could’ve been far worse. His body lurched when he read the part about torture, then again at the insinuation about torturing John. His entire body was fairly trembling, really, through the entire reading and, in fairness to Mycroft, who kept saying so, he was indeed very, very obviously high on cocaine.

“Let me answer him,” Sherlock said. It wasn’t a question, mostly because he already knew the answer was no. He took a step forward for the phone anyway, only to be blocked by a pair of officers whose faces were entirely impossible to remember. There might be another pair of them, somewhere, in Irene’s house. His brain at the present was frustrating him greatly with its haziness. He leaned back against the enormous, opulent frame of a window and his eyes went to Irene, who was, despite being handcuffed, also calmly sipping a martini on a velvet chaise.

As if she’d read his mind, she smiled a bit and said, “Two more upstairs. Ginger male and short brunette woman with freckles.” She took another long sip, and rather impressively set down her glass without spilling a drop. “Mmm and they’ve been there so long I’m starting to think Kate must’ve escaped through a window.”

“We would not harm— ” Mycroft began.

“A lesbian sex worker?” she interrupted, not bothering to hide the heat in her voice. “No, perish the thought. How foolish of me.”

Sherlock chuckled darkly, watching the strain on Mycroft’s face. Then he glared out the window. Eventually, without turning, he said, “If it needs saying, I don’t know where he is either.”

Mycroft made a big production of sitting down, at long last, on a couch. He sighed heavily when he’d accomplished it.

“Alas, what it needs is believing, little brother,” he said.

Sherlock took the words like a slap. He stood more sharply upright and his cheeks colored.

Mycroft studied him. When he chose, petulantly, to say nothing, Mycroft asked, “Do you not believe he’s torturing John?”

Sherlock ruffled further and crossed his arms. He’d come without his coat or he would’ve turned up the lapels. He set his jaw and didn’t answer and planned the most efficient route to the loo in the event he was suddenly as sick as he felt he might be.

“And so you’ve chosen to value the criminal over the war hero.”

“I don’t -” Sherlock suddenly had to support himself on the wall, as a wave of pure fury washed over him. His knuckles were whiter than the thick moulding. “I don’t know WHERE HE IS!” he shouted. The sleeve of his button-down, rolled up nearly to the pit of his elbow, was just beginning to show off the tell-tale bruises there. Mycroft’s eyes took them in, and sighed sadly.

Sherlock pulled down his sleeve and proceeded to grumble like a schoolboy caught in the act of cheating, “Yes, I’m fucking high. Obviously. Well-deduced,” he managed to say this with patronizing sarcasm despite feeling very much like a teenager.

He began to pace by the wall because he could no longer stand still. Mycroft and Irene exchanged a look and then simply watched him, knowing he’d have something more to say with time.

The officers shifted with increasing discomfort until a merciful gesture of permission from Mycroft sent them into an adjoining library.

It was still a few more minutes before Sherlock spoke, and his general demeanor when he did made it clear he would’ve rather stayed silent but couldn’t quite persuade himself.

“I know a few places he’s been,” he said, hands tugging his sleeves when they weren’t convulsively in his hair, “which is another way of saying I know where he’s currently not. He would never return to a place he’s—” His eyes weren’t entirely focusing on any one surface. He wondered why he hadn’t been compiling a list, why he hadn’t been taking notes and looking for patterns that might predict future behavior.

Then, barely realizing it, he was talking again, with deep, undisguised bitterness in his voice. “The real, base problem is that he’s breathtakingly adept at lying, that he actually enjoys lying because it’s difficult and because he’s bored. The usual rules don’t apply to him. He has a near perfect memory for even irrationally complex lies, lies that no sane person would attempt to tell. Lies I don’t even understand—” He cut himself off when he heard the revealingly desperate tone in his own voice. He swore under his breath and fell into a deep scowl.

“Little brother,” Mycroft sighed. “How… disappointing.”

Sherlock groaned uncomfortably and closed his eyes. He moved back to his nook and leaned his forehead against the cool window pane. The sky outside was beginning to turn dark.

“That’s quite enough,” Irene said drily. “He has an addiction.”

“Clearly” Mycroft said, the word punctuated with meaning.

“Mmm, yes, let’s mock him about it, that should solve things,” Irene said. She kept one eye on Sherlock. With enormous dexterity, she also managed another sip of almost pure vodka.

The two from upstairs finally, loudly, began bumbling their way down. The ginger male officer blinked around at everyone. He had scratch marks on his left cheek and they were visibly bleeding.

The brunette woman shrugged and said, “She knocked him out and slid down a drainpipe. Apparently.”

“And where were you?” Mycroft asked, fingers calming the center of his brow.

“Locked in the toilet?” the woman said. She cleared her throat, then said it again without the question mark.

“Honestly,” Sherlock turned his entire body away from their ineptitude, though he was pleased to hear Kate had escaped.

Irene’s face, of course, revealed nothing at the news.

“So I suppose you’ll have to be fucking off now?” she said to the officers.

“Miss Adler, you know perfectly well —” Mycroft began.

Sherlock was still a bit red-faced and still leaning against the wall, but he spoke sharply, “She knows perfectly well you need my cooperation to catch Moriarty, and quite possibly hers as well. Though I suppose you could try to just torture us both for information we don’t presently have, rather than let us try to gather it.”

Mycroft was quiet for a long time, unmoving, yet visibly uncomfortable. Eventually he rolled his eyes and signaled all four officers to leave. When the door closed, he rose himself and unlocked Irene’s handcuffs.

She flexed her wrists and reclined regally in her chair. “So then,” she said.

It was still twenty more minutes before a text was sent.

By then, Jim was on the roof, covered in blood, smoking a cigarette and watching the sun begin to dip over London.

_Could you please explain why you’re doing this, James? Please. This is actually Sherlock and I am actually saying please. SH_

He got the text and re-read it several times. As he tried to make sense of it, he realized he might’ve suffered a concussion at some point. There was a faint buzzing in his ears and despite a very sharp suspicion that the text was not from Sherlock at all, it still made him vaguely ache.

_That’s clever, trying to entrap me with sweet little nothings. Do go on and say more. It would be ever so clever. Xx JM_

He sent the text and lay on his back. He felt the bruises forming on his side and he laughed at the idiocy of taking them all on. A few had turned on him, of course, like frightened animals do when they’re caged. But also like frightened animals, they’d reacted poorly and trapped themselves in their panic.

Jim put a hand over his heart and felt it beating out of rhythm.

His doctor had said to get exercise. And once again, his body had rather annoyingly decided to survive it. Years upon years of surviving, and he was beyond tired of it, maybe he was beyond it altogether.

It was a while before Sherlock answered, long enough that Jim’s driver had audibly returned to the street below. From the sound of it, she’d opened the alley gates and driven inside. It was impressive, and necessary, given how much blood was now stuck dry on his skin and clothes.

_Please._

That was all the text said, but he read it several times before walking back through the dark and bloody building, then a few more times in the back seat of the car as it left the alley and rejoined traffic. Just the one word, with a period after it and everything. Given how long it had taken to send, he felt confirmed in his suspicion that the first one had been from Mycroft. But this one.

He’d been offered that professorship in Paris before leaving university. And against all odds they didn’t seem to know him there. Maybe he could wear tweed with elbow patches and plot world domination while quietly tasking trust-fund idiots with completely impossible assignments. It was the sort of low-level evil to which most aspired. He typed.

_“Please” to the question your brother asked? Why am I doing this, Sherlock? Is that really what you want to know? Why? Since when do you care about the why? Why is incidental, it’s narrative, it’s crafted. Here’s the what, darling: Follow the bodies, find your BFF. If he’s dead, it was after I left. JM_


	2. Chapter 2

Jim was lying on a sofa in his elderly aunt’s house, a half-finished, crocheted blanket half over his legs. The tv was on, airing London news. The sun was beginning to come up outside and birds were beginning to chirp. Small things like that become loud outside the city. It was nauseating.

That’s when Sherlock’s inevitable call came. The news hadn’t even broken yet. Sherlock’s already limited self-control was clearly worsening. He’d obviously called immediately after finding the scene.

“This place is covered in blood,” Sherlock said, instead of 'hello.'

The tone of his voice was vaguely critical, like he was trying to pick a fight, so Jim answered in kind. “Is this a riddle, Sherlock? You know I’m a very busy man.”

“Your crime scene.”

“Oh, right, that. Did you call to see if I’m okay?”

“No. To complain. It doesn’t have your usual—”

“Honestly, you wear the crown jewels _once_ and suddenly a pile of dead hitmen isn’t dramatic enough.”

“I wasn’t going to say drama.”

“Yes, you were.”

“I just can’t… decide if it’s very clean or very messy to kill all your own men.”

“Well do let me know if you figure it out.”

As Sherlock fell silent, Jim could hear John being discovered nearby. He could also hear John ranting volubly about him, though with slightly deflated energy. Sherlock didn’t silence the phone, probably to be cruel. It was nearly twenty minutes before he started talking again.

“So this is just you being childish about needing an operation,” Sherlock said. His tone was biting and angry, utterly different from the stilted, trying-to-sound-empathetic tone he’d used on John. “Are you afraid of needles, too?”

“You sure aren’t.”

Sherlock made a shocked little choking sound at that and fell silent. There were sounds in the background then, a siren among them. They were evidently moving John, who sounded perfectly fine, by ambulance. Honestly, and Sherlock called him dramatic.

Jim flipped channels, looking for any news of the scene in London and finding nothing.

“Are you—” Sherlock started. He sounded like he was fighting himself, and losing. For a man who never, ever lost it probably felt like relief. 

Jim chewed on his lip while he waited for Sherlock to get the words out. He stared around at pictures of himself, hanging in an ugly array of wooden frames on the wall. Himself as a child, sullen and frowning in every shot. Until he was about thirteen, then his face was smiling in each and every picture. A hollow smile. A death mask of a smile. 

Sherlock’s teeth barely unclenched when he asked: “Are you hurt?”

“Do you want me to be?” Jim asked; the hollowness had left the pictures and entered his voice.

Sherlock scoffed. He sounded tired. “I don’t have time for this,” he said, and hung up.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part is really short - pretty much because I'd already written it and forgotten about it. I will be working on another, longer chapter to add in a week or so. Hopefully I'll find a way to bring Irene back because I love her.


	3. Chapter 3

At St. Bart’s, somewhere around 7 a.m., John was put on an IV drip to treat his dehydration. 

Despite Jim’s threats about torture, Sherlock had to admit his best friend was mostly fine; which, really, given the state of the house they’d just left, was a little bit stunning. The other bodies went directly in bags - a task that caused one paramedic to vomit rather unprofessionally in a dark corner.

Squinting far-too-soberly around the hospital wing, after leaving John to sleep, Sherlock realized his lab, largely disused these days, was empty, and close-by, and a fine alternative to his flat where Mycroft was certainly waiting for him. 

A few incorrect lift buttons later, an inexpert but effective dodge of Molly, who was just coming in with her morning sugar-milk concoction, and he spent the rest of the morning sleeping fitfully on the floor of a rather cold room. 

He awoke just before noon and vomited, rather unprofessionally, in a sink. 

A click of stilettos on the other side of the wall, followed shortly thereafter by a door lock clicking open, told him his nausea wasn’t the sole cause of his awakening. 

The door swung inward to reveal Irene, still crouching, with a lock-picking kit in one hand and a brown paper bag in the other. Two coffees sat on the ground at her feet.

She gave him a slight wave and tossed him the bag. The rapid movement required to catch it sent his world briefly spinning. 

He rubbed at his temples with one hand, waiting for the laws of physics to re-stabilize. 

When he looked up again, the door was closed, the coffees were on the lab table and Irene had seated herself comfortably on a nearby stool. She was staring at him and spinning her phone against the tabletop. She nodded at the bag, clutched against his chest. 

“Eat that, it has blueberries,” she said.

“How did you find—” he muttered; his brain felt distinctly slow.

“Find you? My God, Sherlock, darling. Several ways. Number one - that’s a window.” She pointed at the door behind her, which did have a long, rectangular window in it, making the entire lab visible to anyone who might pass by. “The entire floor knows you’re here.”

Sherlock blinked at her, his eyes were bleary and empty, and she continued. 

“Number two - very much a subset of one - Molly texted me when she noticed you asleep on the floor. Number three - you signed in when you came to the hospital and never signed out again. Number four —”

“I’m sure that’s plenty,” Sherlock interrupted, wincing a bit from a sudden headache.

Irene continued, undeterred: “Number four - and this one’s important, darling, so pay attention.” She raised a finger in the air for emphasis, then nudged Sherlock’s coffee towards him. “This,” she gestured around, “is pretty much the first place I would’ve checked anyway.”

Sherlock drank the black coffee (with two sugars) gratefully. It helped ease the maelstrom assaulting his brain, while slightly masking the vomit taste in his mouth.

“Do I want to know why Molly has your number?” he asked. His voice sounded every inch the strung-out he felt.

She half sighed and half laughed. If he squinted he could see clearly that she hadn’t slept, that she’d taken the time to reapply her makeup but not re-set her hair, that she was wearing a large coat, possibly to disguise the fact that she’d yet to change outfits. 

“I’d imagine not, actually.” She gave him a tired smile and sipped her own coffee. She wore several rings with large stones on one hand; when she moved, they caught the light cast in from outside. He realized she hadn’t turned on the halogens; he wondered if it was an act of kindness or a desire to draw the least possible attention to her own presence.

They stared at each other, off and on, for about a minute, sipping coffee and gauging each other. Last night was the first face-to-face contact they’d had in a very long time and Sherlock had been extremely high during it. 

He took a very small bite of the blueberry scone and found he had to force it down. He tossed the remainder on the counter behind him.

“You know where he is, don’t you?” he asked.

She smiled widely, approval beaming from her meticulously-groomed face. Then she frowned a bit, her mind clearly weighing the options. 

“Not if it makes you cross with me,” she said.

“Cross?” he said. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead where a sharp pain was rapidly developing. “I’m not _cross_ , Irene, this isn’t primary school, I’m…” He set down the coffee; then his hands were in his hair, pulling at the curls as he searched for words.

“Perhaps water would’ve been… the wiser choice,” Irene said to herself.

“Frustrated,” he said, suddenly, from behind his hands. Then emerging, he went on rapidly, his thoughts clearly outpacing him. “Vaguely annoyed, deeply embarrassed, surprised, bemused if I’m being honest, and… very honest... evidently.” 

He raked a hand through his hair and walked to the window, disturbed the vertical blinds enough to check the surrounding rooftops. He touched a small, metal tray resting on the sill. He tried to remember if he’d put it there.

A ghost of a voice whispered in his mind: _“Bye ~ It was nice to meet you.”_

“In withdrawal,” she supplied, for his list. 

He turned back towards her, an eyebrow raised.

“Jealous,” she added, her eyes now daring him to react.

He did, but clearly not as expected.

“You knew where he was last night,” he said. He wasn’t aware of the naked innocence on his face, but he could see her responding to it with pity.

“Are you going to tell on me?” she asked, with just the slightest edge of playfulness. 

He glared at her.

“It’s alright if you do,” she went on. “I won’t mind. I’d just appreciate some warning, as a professional courtesy.”

He stalked back towards her. “ _John_.”

She leaned forward and fixed her eyes on him. She said evenly: “He was never going to hurt John.”

Sherlock laughed deliriously. He backed away, watching her face, this time with his own version of pity. “No, of course he wasn’t. They’re old pals,” he laughed, wiping away a tear. 

He continued watching her, now with a bit of fascination. He wondered vaguely if they were sleeping together, she and Jim, if that’s what this was. The physical stasis involved in holding her gaze made his mind race, and he was talking again in seconds. 

“Even if it wasn’t his plan to hurt John - did you not see the crime scene?” He surged forward now, beseeching her to not be so naive. “Twelve bodies scattered throughout various levels of an old brothel. No matter what he claims, I _know_ Moriarty and that was vividly not to plan. One random moment in the lower hallway set off a series of other random moments. I’ve never seen a crime scene of his executed with such chaos. And the fact that he was actually _there_ for the violence— None of it's like him.” Sherlock suddenly took a breath, his lungs feeling oddly compressed. “ _Anything_ could have happened. He’s lucky to be alive.”

“Which one?” she asked.

“What?” he looked at her as if he’d forgotten she was there.

“Which one’s lucky to be alive?”

He blinked at the question and a crucial part of his mind remembered itself.

“J-John,” he stuttered out, then busied himself finding the coffee cup he’d set aside. “Obviously John.”

He sipped his coffee for a moment, hoping it would somehow make the lie look slightly more plausible. 

“So where is he?” he asked a moment later, not looking at her as he feigned nonchalance. 

“He’s upstairs in a hospital bed getting fluids,” she said, then paused, letting a smirk play across her lips. “You did mean John again, right?”

He answered her smirk with a hard, unamused stare.

“Hilarious,” he said.

On the table between them both, her phone lit up. It was an alert: she had a new message from “Big Brother.” 

She opened it, leaned over it, and allowed Sherlock to do the same.

It read: _Miss Adler, I trust you’ll bring my dear brother back to his flat as soon as possible. We’ve yet to discuss the precise terms of our arrangement, nor have we satisfactorily unpacked the myriad lies my brother’s been telling to propel the myth of James Moriarty’s demise. -Mycroft Holmes_

As Sherlock collapsed against the table in front of him, Irene turned the phone so she could see it properly and reread the text. 

Sherlock groaned miserably, pulling at his curls.

“Indeed,” Irene agreed. “Your brother truly throws the worst parties.”

“I may have to flee the country immediately,” he answered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I got to this part much faster than I thought I would. I'm bad at predicting things. The future is dark and uncertain.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Irene and Sherlock meet Mycroft for tea. A general timeframe is at last established. (Still haven't seen season 4 though, don't kill me, I can google.)

Sherlock took one step into the hallway and stopped. Irene’s eyes widened, and she opened her mouth to ask what was wrong when he answered preemptively, “I will never get through this without cocaine.”

She inclined her head slightly and glanced at her watch. “Do you— ”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ll be right—”

“Yes,” he said again, and retreated back into the lab.

It took roughly six minutes for him to rejoin her, at which point his stance was far looser, his expression less troubled and his mind about half as exacting as it usually was. They proceeded together down to the street, Irene leading. She hailed a cab.

In the back seat, after several blocks of silence, Sherlock’s posture drooped and he rolled his eyes. A wave of defeat had crested - he’d been trying to contain a question, but in this state, there was no longer a way to accomplish the task. 

He asked, “What’s wrong with him?” His tone was brittle with irritation as he felt the wave crash.

Irene looked at her nails. He glanced at them as well and judged her manicure at least a week old. 

“Something with his heart,” she said, not turning. “Very treatable with surgery but potentially fatal if he goes too long without. At least, insofar as a doctor under duress with limited supplies can be believed.”

“I didn’t mean that, John did ramble something to that effect,” Sherlock groaned. He collapsed even more completely against the cab seat and, having lost at least some control of his gangly limbs, jostled Irene with his shoulder. “I mean -” he waited, head lolling a bit, until she twisted to meet his gaze: “What’s _different_ with him.”

He couldn’t be sure to what degree the word clarified the question - but he thought he saw a spark of recognition in Irene’s eyes. Of course, it was gone as quickly as it came; it was replaced by a species of bright-eyed, razor-sharp insouciance she really ought to patent.

“What’s _different?_ ” she repeated, thoughtfully. Then she gave him a predatory smile - the smile of a snake choosing its moment. “Lots of things are _different_ , Sherlock. Enormous intellect, enormous capacity for wickedness, enormous… _other things_.” She said this last breathily - the tone she usually employed to make him squirm.

If he hadn’t been high, it would’ve been a successful ploy. His sexual insecurities would’ve kicked in; he would’ve retreated into himself. As it was, he just felt a stab of jealousy, almost instantly vanished by the anesthetic of cocaine.

He moved closer, his face mere inches from her cheek. 

“ _You don’t know the answer,_ ” he half-whispered, half sang at her, then touched the tip of her nose with one finger.

She groaned and nudged him back to his side. “Oh, this will be much more fun when it’s being inflicted on your brother,” she said.

Sherlock froze a bit, remembering the disaster to which they were in transit. His eyes closed and he leaned against the cab window. Neither of them spoke again until they arrived at Baker Street. Then Sherlock leaned to her and said briefly, “You should put those rings in your pocket, they’re giving you away.” 

Surprise flashed in her eyes. When he leaned back from paying the cabbie, she placed a palm against his cheek. The artifice had dropped from her face and she was giving him a very particular look. He couldn’t say he entirely understood the emotion she was trying to convey - but he understood at least that there was one.

He nodded back awkwardly. Rings carefully in her coat, they proceeded together to 221B. 

Inside, Mrs. Hudson greeted them with her usual base-level of panic, now with Rosie -squealing for whatever children are always squealing for - balanced on her good hip. 

She froze for a brief moment - visibly decided not to ask about the woman who’d already died at least twice but was now in her entryway - but then proceeded to warn them both about Mycroft having prepared tea for them upstairs. Evidently he’d also done several rude things since letting himself in the night previously and she requested Sherlock ask him to leave as soon as it became polite. 

When he didn’t answer, Irene said, “Thank you, Mrs. Hudson. I’m sure he’ll ask long before it’s polite.”

Upstairs, they found Mycroft in John’s chair, three cups of tea set out, one already being drunk. Mycroft spoke without turning or standing. “You took six minutes longer than I would’ve thought necessary so I began without you.” 

Irene answered for them both. “It’s wonderful to see you too, Mycroft,” she said. She proceeded into the sitting room without preamble and took her proffered seat on the couch. She still didn’t remove her coat, which surprised Sherlock not at all.

“It appears you’ve had a long night, Miss Adler,” Mycroft said, to which Irene made no reply but an acknowledging smile and began adding sugar to her tea. Mycroft continued, a brief glance going to his younger brother, “Sherlock, why don’t you go clean yourself up and leave Miss Adler and myself to iron out our working arrangement.”

Sherlock glanced down at himself blankly. His shirt was rumpled and rather stained from helping John out of that chair. He also had the smell of his own vomit, a paramedic’s vomit, and twelve dead bodies on him. Mycroft was being irritating, but he did have a slight point. 

“Fine,” he said. “Do make yourself at home, brother.”

“However clean you can manage will have to be acceptable,” Mycroft answered quickly.

Sherlock set his jaw but said nothing. 

Mycroft sat silently, eating a biscuit, evidently waiting to begin the discussion until Sherlock left. 

Sherlock had the distinct feeling he’d been relegated to the children’s table. When he slammed his bedroom door a moment later, it didn’t help the feeling dissipate. He felt worse. He stripped off his clothes angrily, feeling younger than a teenager now - feeling like a child who’d been caught poking a dead rabbit with a stick, trying to look inside.

He paused in front of the bathroom mirror, noting the changes to his thinning frame. He could feel Jim’s eyes on him, appraising the increased visibility of his ribs, the bruises on the inner skin of his right elbow, the puncture marks from his 7% cocaine solution.

He heard Jim’s voice in his head for the second time that day - the ghost of a voice. 

_You should let me do it, if you’re so determined. At least then you wouldn’t bruise._

_“_ I’m not falling for that again,” he said to his own reflection, just as he’d answered Jim in their hotel suite in Brussels. He felt the ghost sensation of teeth biting his right shoulder, half-playfully, half actually furious. He rubbed at the spot, glanced up again to find his reflection rather a blur. He ran the faucet and splashed cold water on his face.

After a shower, during which his eyes kept falling closed, his mind, unbidden, showing him the precise blood spatter caking the walls in that building (Sally Donovan shouting, “We’re gonna need more light in here!” every few seconds), he put on new trousers and a purple shirt Jim liked. He added some product to his still-damp hair and returned to the living room.

Irene and Mycroft were both leaned towards the coffee table and Irene was typing something on her phone while reading out loud. 

All Sherlock caught was “dead drop” before Mycroft interrupted her.

“How good of you to join us, little brother. Read it from the beginning for Sherlock, this concerns him, too.”

“Let me guess: we’re texting Moriarty again,” Sherlock said. He barely remembered to call him ‘Moriarty’ in time, but luckily the world appeared to be moving at a vastly reduced speed. His brain was also far closer to the ceiling than it usually was and his face felt pleasantly warm. He chose not to sit, and utterly ignored the tea set out for him. It would be cold by now anyway.

In his peripheral vision, he could see Irene switching from her notes to a text conversation, then scrolling up. With no guilt, she said, “Jim texted me this morning.”

“Of course he did,” Sherlock answered, no emotion in his voice. “Go on.”

“There’s not much,” she said. A grin was just barely playing at her lips. He glanced at Mycroft who seemed determined not to look amused.

“The first text is from him. It says, ’New number,’ with a kiss.” 

Sherlock moved forward immediately, and Mycroft, clearly anticipating this, held up a scrap of paper. 

“I’ve written it down,” he said.

He snatched the paper from Mycroft but looked to Irene. 

“It’s correct,” she said, to which Mycroft muttered something about ‘honestly,’ as Sherlock slipped the paper in his pocket.

“I answered ‘They have John at St. Bart’s. He’s on an IV,’ to which he responded ‘lol.’”

Sherlock muttered, “Of course,” and walked to the window, the curtains of which Mycroft had annoyingly pulled aside. He searched the windows across the street, the rooftops, for something to do.

“Go on,” Mycroft instructed Irene.

“Within seconds of the last, he told me to send pictures.”

Sherlock turned sharply, his interest piqued. “You sent him pictures of John in a hospital bed?”

She nodded. “Of course I did, dear, he was asleep. They were easy enough to take.” When she scrolled again, he judged the length to encompass at least three pictures. “He answered with 8 skull emojis,” she added, finally.

Sherlock turned to Mycroft, and said, “That means ‘dead,’ as in, ‘that’s so hilarious I’m dead.’” He said it as didactically as one can say such a thing.

Mycroft, now openly stifling a laugh, answered, “Yes, Molly’s told me as much.”

“Does _everyone_ text Molly?” Sherlock whined.

Irene and Mycroft said, “Yes,” at the exact same moment.

Sherlock, with the air of someone who’s just been disinvited from a party, sighed and turned back to the window. “Go on. What else?”

“Just moments ago, he texted: ‘Thank you for the driver, by the way. She’s completely silent. I looooooove her.’ Seven ‘o’s in ‘love,’ then an emoji face with one finger over its mouth and another surrounded by hearts. He’s very into emojis lately.”

“Has he ever not been,” Sherlock grumbled.

“We were brainstorming a response when you joined us,” Mycroft supplied.

“What about the driver’s identity?” Sherlock asked. 

“Sebastiana Moran,” Irene said. “Former client of mine, ex-military, looking for work. I think you’ll find I’ve been very forthcoming, Sherlock. If you can manage to sit, please, it would make us all more comfortable.”

Sherlock looked at her quizzically. He didn’t want Mycroft to know she was working with Moriarty, he wasn’t even entirely sure he wanted to _catch_ Moriarty, but nor did he know what to make of this change in Irene - this sudden compliance. 

He sat in his usual chair, finding the forced stasis only a bit difficult if he kept up a strumming pattern with his fingers against his knees. He watched Irene with more concentration than before.

The silence stretched, threatening to drive him mad. 

“And you were going to set a trap?” he asked. “If he’s talking, if he’s off-balance, which he is - no one, not even Moriarty, can personally murder 12 people due to a mistake and not be off-balance - then we should set a trap, before he —”

He trailed off, watching Irene and Mycroft exchange a meaningful look. When their eyes returned to him, Irene looked sympathetic and Mycroft was disappointed. “Frankly, I’m afraid neither of us believes you can be impartial, Sherlock. Irene has given me some of the background.”

Sherlock laughed before he could help himself. “Irene has given you —” He met her eyes and she met his. Only sympathy shone back - she was a perfect replica of concern. Of course she was selling him out to outpace the firing squad. To the last, she wouldn’t disappoint. “And what, precisely, is the background?” he asked through gritted teeth.

Mycroft sighed heavily and began speaking with obvious distaste. “For an indeterminate period of time during your death, you were involved in a serious romantic relationship, or at least a… sexual relationship, with James Moriarty.” 

Sherlock wanted to sink into the floor; or, barring that, at least retreat into some corner of his mind palace where he’d never be seen again. 

His brother just kept talking. “You ended things before your return, and have since been keeping up the pretense that he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the mouth on the roof of Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, either out of guilt or from a sense of obligation to your former —”

“ _Shut up_ , s _hut up_ —” Sherlock was on his feet again, but he couldn’t remember standing up. His brain was on fire, but he couldn’t remember the match. He was pacing. He knew on practically every level he was only making it utterly obvious that the story was true.

He’d paced in a massive circle and was somewhere near the kitchen, when all at once the momentum dropped out of him and he said, “Oh, fine.” Mycroft would at least have to strain his neck to see the expression on his face. “Fine, yes. We— The circumstances were— Yes. Of course we were sleeping together — we were both dead, who else was I supposed to sleep with? Has it really not been _obvious_ all along?” He scrubbed at his face, which felt unpleasantly warm now. “Not that it’s any of your _precise business_ , brother.” The cocaine should’ve been helping him focus but it was suddenly having the opposite effect. He felt like he was drowning, and the world was an unreadable haze, filled with oxygen he couldn’t assimilate. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I need to—”

“You injected yourself with the syringe in your pocket less than an hour ago, Sherlock.” Mycroft was right in front of him, holding his arm firmly. “No, you do not need to.”

Sherlock laughed slightly, then a bit deliriously. Then he shoved Mycroft roughly away. Irene jumped to her feet, to stabilize Mycroft’s balance. An altercation might well have occurred if Sherlock’s phone hadn’t rung just a moment later.

The brothers continued to glare at each other across the sound, until Sherlock finally relented. He answered tersely, “Yes, what do you want?”

He was silent. “Rosie is with Mrs. Hudson, John, how would I know whether she’s —”

He’d evidently been cut off so he was silent a moment longer. “Fine, yes,” he finally answered. “Be there shortly.”

He hung up, stared at his phone a moment, gears in his head turning, fire running through his veins. 

When he looked up, he was forcing himself to smile, to be light. “It would appear John’s received a concerning amount of cards and gifts at his bedside. Concerning to John, at any rate. The price of being ever-so-slightly in the public eye.” He was slipping the phone away and already reaching for his coat. “I’m sure there’s no real cause for alarm but as John is upset, and it doesn’t directly concern either of you—”

Mycroft was smiling through Sherlock’s speech, but he interrupted at this point, “Your lies are like tissue paper, brother, the story hasn’t been released to the media. You know as well as I do it could only be one person sending him things.”

Sherlock paused and visibly shuddered. He stepped aside and gestured for Mycroft to precede him towards the stairs.

“My car’s waiting,” Mycroft said, beginning the descent. 

When he’d gone, Sherlock turned to Irene. “I am not sitting next to him.” 

“Perhaps we can strap him on the roof,” she said brightly, and they were off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so, I plan to shift back to Jim's perspective fairly soon. The issue is that he's, you know, up to something. Hope you're not getting too tired of so much plot before the action starts. I guess I'm into plot. Who knew.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Moriarty makes a move.

John’s hospital bed was surrounded by cards - many wished him to get well soon, but by no means all. Others extended birthday wishes or condolences. In fact, the one sitting on John’s lap when they arrived said ‘Happy Birthday, Beautiful!’ on the front. Beneath the text was a cartoon drawing of a woman driving a red convertible, a scarf around her neck blowing in the wind. 

John was upright - his mouth open. He clearly had a lot to say, but choked on it rather violently when Irene Adler came around the corner. 

“Nice to see you again, John,” Irene said cordially.

Sherlock looked a bit blank as he placed himself nearest the table of cards. His mobile slipped back in his pocket and he glanced between John and Irene. Eventually he said, “Yes, Irene’s out of hiding.”

“ _Right._ ” John bit off the word. His voice sounded raw and untested. 

“Wait - is your hair wet?” John asked suddenly. “You never leave the house with — Is he high?”

“Unrelentingly, yes,” Mycroft answered for them both, coming into the room somewhat out of breath.

“Ever since last night,” added Irene.

“Obviously,” said Sherlock, though he shot Irene a betrayed look.

“You fucking prick,” John muttered. He pressed a palm to his head and closed his eyes. The knuckles on his other hand were white, his fingers clenched in the sheets to the point of tearing. He was pushing down the anger, to be unleashed later, when its source would be almost completely forgotten. 

It reminded Sherlock viscerally of a fight he’d had with Jim over a year ago. 

They were on the top observation deck of the Eiffel Tower, midday. Evidently Paris put Jim in a terrible mood because they’d been fighting since at least the Musée d’Orsay about something Sherlock was finally admitting to himself he didn’t completely understand. The sky around them was sunny but cold. Jim kept joking about cutting the bars and pushing Sherlock through. It sounded less like a joke each time he said it.

“You’re worse than John with the solar system, just because I don’t care about some flowers and a church,” Sherlock said.

Jim didn’t rise to the bait at first, he just corrected him evenly. “About Van Gogh, you twat.” Then he walked off to circle the viewing tower for the third time, leaving Sherlock staring down at the Seine. The arrondissements of Paris were spread out beneath them like a paper fan. 

It took Jim less than a minute to complete the circuit but his mood was both lighter and more frightening when he returned. He came up right behind Sherlock. His left hand pressed lightly on Sherlock’s waist; the rest of his body pressing like a lead weight and pinning him against the cage of the observation deck. A strong breeze swept through the bars, lightly shaking the tower as it went.

_Does this bring back memories for you, too?_

Jim asked the question in a cheerful voice, as if they were tourists pointing out landmarks. It sent a chill down Sherlock’s spine. Jim must’ve felt the shiver against his chest because he laughed.

“Stop it,” Sherlock growled back. “People are looking.”

_Now who’s worse than John? Worrying about other people._

There was an edge to his words. Finally a response to Sherlock’s bait then, his desperate jab at a known pressure point, to gauge where they were, what they were even fighting about.

_Do you know what makes the two of you such good friends?_

There was more of an edge than before. Jim was really almost growling against his neck now. Sherlock swallowed.

_“_ I imagine you’re about to tell me,” he answered. His voice was empty of emotion but his heart was pounding, as it always did when he had no idea what Jim was about to do.

_No. I’m really asking, Sherlock. What makes you good friends?_

“Stop,” Sherlock jerked back against Jim this time, openly trying to free himself. He was reminded in no uncertain terms that Jim’s slight frame is far stronger than it looks, and it held him fast against the bars.

_You like him. You think he’s good, and God help you, you think he’s interesting. But with him, it’s addiction. And I think we both know that’s not the same as liking someone, Sherls._

Jim’s lips were suddenly too high on Sherlock’s neck. He was standing on his toes, then, unstable. Sherlock elbowed him in the gut. The force combined with the instability in Jim’s stance gave Sherlock enough space to squeeze free and move for the lift. 

“Sherlock?” Mycroft asked again.

He blinked and looked around. Hospital. They were at the hospital. At St. Bart’s, in John’s room.

“Yes? What?” he snapped. He leaned on the irritation, hoping it would disguise the fact that he’d completely lost at least several minutes of time.

Mycroft’s eyes knew too much, pitied him too much. 

“Play it again,” he said to John.

John closed the card on his lap, which had been lying open with a big M and two ‘x’s written in red inside. At a glance, it looked like lipstick. There was also a twenty pound note loose against the fold. When he opened it again, the audio recording inside reactivated and Moriarty’s voice spoke. His version of a birthday greeting.

“Well, hello, John!” Moriarty’s voice said. He sounded cheerful. Maybe he’d recorded it before killing 12 people and nearly dying. Anything was possible if not likely. He went on: “If I’m being nitpicky, the exam you gave was rather shite and unprofessional, but as I did engage your services, please find your standard fee enclosed.”

Next to Sherlock, Irene made an odd little sound that could’ve been disapproval.

Someone evidently interrupted Moriarty in the background because he shouted, “Get out of here - I’m working!” 

He cleared his throat, resumed the cheerful tone he’d been affecting previously. “I do always pay my debts, Johnny. Eventually. You should remind Sherlock of that. In fact… you can let him know I’ll be paying him back very soon now. Bye!” Before the recording cut off, Jim screamed, “I will SKIN YOU, old woman!" 

It took Sherlock several minutes to realize everyone was looking at him. He felt numb. He felt like he was fighting with Jim in Paris about something he had absolutely no ability to comprehend.

“What do you think he means, Sherlock?” Mycroft asked again. The way he was leaning in, being slow with his words and modulating his tone. He was adopting a very specific posture and cadence - the one you take with victims of domestic abuse or sexual assault, people with Stockholm Syndrome, recently released hostages. He was actually trying to be gentle. 

“He’s drunk,” Sherlock said. “He always repeats the skinning people threat when he’s drunk, never when he’s sober.”

Irene gave him a naked look of complete agreement. And there it was again - disapproval. The sound she’d made - it was disapproval, and of Moriarty, not of him.

“Right,” said John. “Wait, no. What? How do you know that?”

Sherlock kept his eyes on Irene to stabilize himself. “Although I have… pointed it out to him, so it could always just be a misdirect. Could it? Yes.”

“No, Sherlock. Pointed it out to him? When?” John asked. 

Sherlock sighed heavily and closed his eyes, for the millionth time wishing he was anywhere else. He realized he was trembling just as he began to speak. “I knew Moriarty was alive. During my death, we slept together over several months, in several European countries. I ended it, then I was alive again, honestly is it really that shocking? I did kill a man - do we all remember that? Excuse me.” 

He made it into the hallway without his brother stopping him, and used the moment to lean breathlessly against the wall and check his texts. The walls were not soundproof. Through wood and plaster and the ocean sounds swirling in his ears, he could hear John being asked to calm down.

_I need to see you. SH_

He could walk faster than Mycroft, much faster, and he’d used that fact on the way in to text without being seen. But there was still no response from Jim. He deleted the text to be safe.

The door behind him opened and he slipped the phone back in his pocket. 

John was shouting, “Get him back in here!” when the door blessedly closed again.

Sherlock turned to see Irene, her own phone in hand. Slowly, she leaned against the wall next to him and sighed like she’d been awake for at least a month. “He won’t answer that,” she said, nodding at Sherlock’s pocket. “But he’ll see you if you arrange it through me.”

Sherlock closed his eyes, his heart pounding just as it had in Paris. His body felt pressed against that wire frame barrier— trapped. Like an animal. In a space too tight to get a full breath. He could even feel Jim's body - warm, annoyingly comforting, and crushing him as he looked down at a long, long fall.

“He trusts you more than he trusts me?” he asked sharply. It came out less a question than a waterfall of frustration.

Irene’s eyes widened a bit but she nonetheless answered evenly. “No, dear, we have a prearranged system to be sure something’s not been interfered with.”

Sherlock remembered Jim’s ciphers. Notebooks full of them. Several times he’d woken up to find Jim gone, went looking for him even though of course he could sleep just as well alone, and found him with his glasses on, his left hand already half ink as he scribbled in those books. He groaned at the way the memory made him feel - needy and empty and uncertain.

He stretched his neck and felt sure something was wrong with his joints. Small, specific parts of him felt assembled wrong. He felt a very strong sensation forming behind his eyes, like a sinus infection or the beginning of a migraine. His entire body was working against him, was either shaking or going warm or going cold. He couldn’t seem to get a deep breath.

“Fine, tell him then,” he breathed. “I need — I need to sit down.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I find Sherlock much harder to write than Moriarty because I really don't think he's very aware of himself? While being extremely aware of almost everything else? Also I don't know why I made him high because that's even harder? Anyway I'm trying! I don't want to write one of them flat, that's no fun.  
> Next chapter is Moriarty.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally Moriarty is back. (Did you miss him?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Some homophobia in this one, and likely subsequent ones. Also mentions of past abuse. Sorry. The world is absolute trash.

It started with a three-person, half-formed mutiny. At some point during John’s commentary on his various medical issues they’d apparently decided Jim was walking around in a weakened state, on borrowed time. They’d also, through some bizarre chain of mutual misinformation, decided Jim had copious amounts of cash on his person.

When Sherlock hung up on him, Jim adjusted his back against a scratchy throw pillow, rested the phone on his bare chest and closed his eyes. He was almost asleep when a sudden wave of pain raked through him, shaking him physically. He looked down at himself, his body now paler than Sherlock’s and almost as thin; he’d been forced by his own homicidal acts to strip down to pants, to ball his very expensive, very blood-stained and completely ruined clothes in a plastic bag in the corner.

Most of the bruising was on his left side. He’d felt it before but now he could see it clearly. He thought about sending Sherlock a picture, but he honestly didn’t have the energy.

When he closed his eyes again, he pictured Sherlock going through the rooms in that place - finding the three dead from penetrating wounds near the bottom of the stairs, then another one, nearly beheaded, in the narrow, upstairs hallway leading toward the bedrooms.

He could see their eyes - their big, stupid eyes - believing they’d found a weakness they could capitalize on. He saw those eyes learning very quickly they were wrong, and then he saw those eyes not doing much of anything at all.

He’d mused vaguely at the time about whether it proved Sherlock right - maybe under all the pretension he just liked killing people. Regardless, kill three members of a team and you don’t have an enormous amount of choice about killing the rest. The one upstairs, for example, hadn’t been very happy to see Jim covered in blood. He’d called him something rather unpleasant, in fact, which led pretty directly to Jim’s knife scraping the inner vertebrae of his neck.

He pictured Sherlock looking at that, being a little bit impressed by that, and then probably hating himself for it and checking how much cocaine he had left.

Jim’s heart beat painfully in his chest.

Getting Sherlock’s attention again, thinking about him with such intimate focus again; the thing was, it couldn’t not be arousing. He felt like he was pressing his body closer and closer to an open flame, daring himself to just self-immolate.

Giving up on a text, he finally tossed his phone on the coffee table, where it knocked a very creepy statue of Jesus on the floor and nearly broke a dish of caramels.

His aunt would likely wake up soon, and likely scream when she found her nephew looking half-dead on the couch. He’d passed her bedroom when he arrived; she’d been sleeping with curlers in her hair, a muted tv lighting her room with a soft, shifting glow.

He’d pulled the door shut to muffle his rummaging, his showering, and the fifteen minute period when he’d passed out naked in the hallway. She was his only living aunt, after all.

Another wave of pain - this one bringing with it a spinning, floating sensation - and he could see Sherlock vividly. He looked the way he’d looked on the floor of that drug den.

He put a hand on his heart as it spasmed painfully, as the sound of chirping birds began to slow down rather alarmingly outside.

Fleetingly, and with more fascination than worry, he realized if he had a heart attack, his entire left side would be entirely too fucked to even notice. Then, for the second time that morning, he passed out.

Paris had been shit since they arrived, and remained shit the entire time they were there. It became clear the moment they stepped off the train, heard the drifting accordion music and saw the vendors selling roses. It was one of the few times since they’d started living together, well, since he’d more or less tricked Sherlock into following him and sharing his various flats, that they’d moved in such opposite directions about something. All Jim wanted to do was grope Sherlock against the walls of Montmartre, tell him dirty stories about the red light district and maybe fuck his mouth in a cathedral, time permitting. Everything about Paris was grit and sex and romance and art but Sherlock hated every second of it. Practically the only thing he liked was the greater freedom to smoke.

Jim was chasing Sherlock down the stairs of the Eiffel Tower. They’d caused a complete scene on the lift from the top deck down to the second landing - Jim trying to pull Sherlock closer to him so they could talk, or at least so he could press against him while being vaguely menacing.

In response, Sherlock retreated into a disguise. He put on his broken-and-abused vicar voice. He sounded on the verge of tears as he told various strangers, who thankfully did not understand English, that he didn’t know Jim and just wanted to be left alone.

Then at the first stop the bastard had taken off running for the stairs, and he, perhaps not to his enormous credit, had indulged him and given chase.

_Oh, please, it wasn’t indulgence, James._

Sherlock’s voice in his head. Sherlock’s silhouette standing over him, blocking out the sun. All curls and elbows.

_I pulled away, I started fights, I got sullen about cases I couldn’t work when I was in hiding, one too many times I woke up in your bed alone and just went back to sleep. It wasn’t indulgence that made you run after me._

“Sherlock,” he tried to say. But something was off. He couldn’t move; he could only look up. He could only see Sherlock’s edges, not his face or his skin, just his edges twisting away, unable to look at the body on the ground.

The sun was too bright. He’d hit his head rather hard in the fall. He didn’t understand why he wasn’t dead.

A phone fell against his chest, shocking him into consciousness. The room around him - his aunt’s living room - swam jarringly back into focus, reality washing back in too-rapid waves,the pain in his body worse with each successive curl of the tide. It wasn’t entirely dissimilar from being water-boarded. He bent double, collapsing into a violent coughing fit.

Outside, the damn birds were still at it. It was still early. From the shadows, he judged he’d been unconscious less than an hour. Someone was in the kitchen, clattering about and humming. That would be his aunt. Another figure stood nearby - a short, powerful-looking woman, wearing all the parts of a decent suit save the collared shirt. The tank-top which replaced it seemed ten years older than everything else. Everything about her said military.

“Fucking hurt,” he said, his entire body cringed at all the noises and movements of life around him. She just stared at him with a blank face and shrugged in apology.

“This is the new one?” he said. He said it to test his voice more than anything, because of course it was. He held the phone against his chest. His other hand gripped his head. He had to lean forward at a very precise angle to even hear himself over the ache in the right side of his skull. “And my aunt let you in.”

She nodded to both questions and handed him a house coat she’d evidently taken the initiative to procure. By the time he’d wrapped it around himself she’d left, was out smoking on the patio, being silent and serene at the birds.

His limbs held when he stood, a bit to his surprise, and they managed to carry him to the kitchen. He tried briefly to stretch his face into a smile, but abandoned the exercise within seconds. His aunt knew him anyway. It made no difference.

“Aoife,” he said, trudging to the table like a badly reanimated corpse.

“Jimmy,” she responded. She set a plate of sausages in front of him and he pushed it away. The coffee, however, he pulled closer.

When she turned for the counter, he said irritably, “I don’t want sugar.”

“Hair of the dog?” she asked, too cheerily; evidently she’d decided to explain his presence with a rough night out and a hangover. He glared at her. 

Polite domesticity was the exact opposite of what he wanted, but what he wanted was in her left hand, so he took the bottle. Combined with the coffee, it ran down his throat like hot strychnine; he nearly drained the cup in one go. 

Sherlock’s silhouette was still on his retinas when he closed his eyes. He rubbed his face with both hands, trying to rid himself of the dream. It didn’t help.

He must’ve cursed without even hearing himself because his aunt admonished him. Then, again too cheerily, she said, “And you’ll be needing a doctor, by the look of it. Your friend said it wasn’t one of your  _male friends_  who did that to you — but, Jimmy, I really think if you just found a nice girl, you'd be much happier. That way, you could have children. Children always do lessen our souls' burdens.”

He probably should have seen that coming. But his rage evidently did not, because it came on like  a violent storm on a clear day. 

Seconds later he could see he’d disrupted the table, overturned his chair. His coffee and breakfast were on the floor amongst broken china; the bottle of whiskey was clutched in his less mangled hand.

His aunt had skittered away to the corner. He watched her with his muscles tensing, sound fading in and out like a radio tuning. His jaw felt like a vise. 

As a teenager, his father used to recommend local ‘career girls’ to him over breakfast as a display of fatherly acceptance, acknowledgement that Jim wanted something ‘a bit different.’ Then he’d beat him with a belt at night because his voice was getting too sissy, or because he’d found pictures of naked men under his mattress, or _just because_ , really, he didn’t always need a reason.

Right at that moment, Jim was certain he looked exactly like his father, brandishing a whiskey bottle half-naked in a housecoat. He also knew the old man would be rolling in his grave, disgusted at the comparison.

He laughed lightly, then a bit harder. “Whoopsie daisy,” he said. He picked up his chair and slumped back into it.

Seated, his features dropped and he just stared at the formica. Aoife brought over a new cup of coffee. He could feel a tiny piece of his self-control tinkling around his skull, a little metal thing broken off, hopefully not too important but definitely not where it was supposed to be anymore. He felt like burning down London. He didn’t. He was pretty far from London. He settled for texting Irene his new number and muttering “God, why didn’t I smother you in your sleep.”

“Because family protects family,” his aunt said, a bit shakily.

She took her seat in front of a plate of eggs. He watched her curiously. She knew what he was. The criminal web, the hundreds of murders. She knew. None of that bothered her near as much as his sexuality. 

“And that belief system is precisely why you’re still alive,” he finally answered.

It was hours later, Jim had drunkenly recorded a card and sent it off to London with Sebastiana. A local doctor had been around to the house, reiterated much of what John had said, strongly recommended that he go to the hospital right away for further tests, told him he’d broken a rib on his left side and sprained three fingers on his left hand, reprimanded him for sleeping with a concussion and then, somewhat incongruously, gave him an enormous amount of pain killers.

Subsequently, he was squinting at a dating reality program on the telly and saying, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” when he got the text from Sherlock.

_I need to see you. SH_

He leaned forward in his seat. He read it again, then again, at least twenty more times.

He pressed the screen to his forehead and reminded himself to breathe, to think. The pain killers had made him weak so he actually whined “Sherlock,” into his hands. His aunt glanced over from her easy chair, where she’d been knitting baby clothes for probably literally no one. She wisely said nothing. 

Ridiculous, infuriating Sherlock. Literally beg him for attention, for weeks on end, and the man still wouldn’t return a text. Commit an atrocity and suddenly he’s a puddle - suddenly he needs you. It would’ve made any lesser man go completely mad.

He knew Mycroft was there, with both of them in London, was watching them. Irene had made that clear with the pictures she’d sent. Three pictures of John, all from nearly the same angle. Three meant unsafe, that she was being watched. And then the recent text about a dead drop location they’d predetermined as a decoy. Whatever information landed there would be false. She was walking a tightrope in London, to serve as his eyes. She would know the truth.

He texted Irene their code phrase, predetermined in case Sherlock asked to see him.

_Tell Sherlock I still have his violin. JM_

There were a few such codes for unverified requests from Sherlock, each prearranged to have two possible responses: verification or rejection. In this case: ‘He knows. He’s mentioned it before’ would mean the text was genuine, that Sherlock did in fact want to meet him, ‘He doesn’t want it back’would mean the text was a fake or in some way false.

He curled into a ball on his side, feeling the ice pack on his ribs slip closer to his crotch. He decided it would serve him better there and closed his eyes to wait.

His mind went soft again, returned him to the Eiffel Tower and Sherlock’s long legs.

Those long legs. They’d made a speedy descent easy for him, relatively safe. He’d taken the stairs in twos, by Jim’s recollection. He was like a damn cat on those stairs. Only someone utterly suicidal could’ve caught him.

And so Jim had done, by taking the stairs in fours and fives, half falling down every other flight, keeping himself up with his hands and arms more than his feet. They weren’t even a quarter of the way down when he’d reached Sherlock and tackled him - not entirely on purpose, but not entirely not on purpose either.

Sherlock, underneath him on that landing. Both of them panting. Sherlock squirming to get free for only a fraction of a second before he dropped the pretense and just started looking at Jim like he’d gone insane.

“Tag,” Jim said, lightly.

“Get off,” Sherlock hissed.

Jim pretended to think about it before answering. “You know… I don’t think I will, actually.” A fake apology coated his words. “Do you think we’re on camera right now? For a tourist spot, the security here is really —”

“John is my friend and—”

“And?” Jim asked. The name always made his blood boil and Sherlock knew it perfectly well. He probably thought it was jealousy. It wasn’t. Or, it wasn’t just jealousy. It was what John represented. It was Sherlock trying to provoke him, to hurt him.

His hands were on Sherlock’s shoulders, holding him down. He noted their distance from Sherlock’s throat. Mere centimeters. “And? AND? AND WHAT?” he shouted.

“Get. Off. Of. Me.”

Jim got to his feet, but he didn’t move far from Sherlock. Maybe he couldn’t. Self control was a tricky thing. He paced around him, penned him against the wall. His entire body was behaving like it was ready to fight.

Sherlock clocked all of it, of course. That he’d come a little bit unhinged, that his posture was violent, that he was actively trying to scare him.

Jim was more than a little proud of Sherlock when he stood up straighter and shouted at him, “ _Stop screaming in my face when I try to talk_!”

“Talk then.”

“What you said - up there. Is wrong. He’s my friend. Don’t make him a part of this or…”

He trailed off, but Jim still didn’t like that ‘or’ he left hanging. He fought himself to calm down, to not break everything. He failed on all levels but the surface, where he succeeded tremendously. His posture dropped. He shrugged lightly.

“I’m not the one who brought him up,” he said. 

“He’s  _good_. He’s  _normal_.” Sherlock said it like he was begging.

It wasn’t even about hurting Jim anymore - it was just a belief structure. A belief structure sliding a knife quietly between his ribs.

Jim’s face dropped into nothingness, all traces of light and dark disappearing equally; at a guess, he’d say it landed somewhere around emptily dangerous - a speeding bus suddenly without a driver.

“So I’m the big, bad man, Sherlock. We’re playing that game now?” Sherlock shook his head and turned away. They’d had the same fight before, many times before, but they’d never come into it this hot. It was reckless, dangerous even, and they both knew it. “Someone to blame for everything you’re ashamed of.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re not sociopathically selfish, you’re not a criminal, you’re not _gay_. It was all just little ole me. It was all me  _infecting_ you.” Jim went blank for a mere second - came back to himself with his hands on Sherlock’s waist, staring up at him, much closer now. Sherlock hadn’t moved, was still as the grave but not meeting his eyes. He was going that precise shade of mauve that meant he was seconds from snapping.

“This is not about… that,” he said. His voice was more than a little broken and Jim swallowed a knot in his throat.

_You knew I was right on the edge. You pushed anyway._

“Well,” he’d hissed into Sherlock’s neck because that face was turned away. “The only way I get to touch you in public is by picking a fight. So tell me what that’s about.”

_You knew I was right on the edge but you pushed me anyway._

Because his hands were on Sherlock’s frame, he felt the tremors of an aborted sob shake through his chest, the aftershocks of emotion being smothered; then he felt his muscles tense to the point of snapping.

Sherlock pushed him roughly aside and moved to the stairs. He said without turning, “I’m staying in a hotel tonight.”

Jim groaned in his sleep. In his hand, new texts were filling his phone.

_He knows, he’s mentioned it before. IA_

Then a series of emojis - a code Mycroft wouldn’t bother deciphering.

A single picture of Sherlock in profile, his hair damp.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've edited this chapter and I'm still not entirely happy with it but eh Jim in a domestic setting... I'm gonna forgive myself for not being perfect at writing that on the first go. It's entirely possibly I'll edit it again. The themes are pretty dark so I'm kind of trying to weigh things against each other.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A meeting of rivals.

Irene had told him when and where. Verbally, nothing written down.

Then it was just about giving Mycroft the slip at the appropriate time, which was strangely easy with everyone going over the greeting cards, the CCTV footage from the hospital, everything Moriarty had said to Irene over the past few days. They were still debating a dead drop to draw him out, grab him when he came to collect the package. Obviously stupid, but he gave Irene points for her ability to distract.

They were intent on confining him to his room and taking all his drugs away, of course. John, after he’d been extensively talked down by everyone who wasn’t Sherlock, still forbade him contact with Rosie since he couldn’t, evidently, be trusted anymore. Whether that was more about Moriarty or the cocaine was really anyone’s guess. 

Irene, Mycroft, and John would work the case, it was decided, with Sherlock being given only the most tangential role. Fine then. Dropping the charade was fine with him. He’d work his own case, seek his own results. Alone suited him fine. It always had.

Seven minutes after ten that night, he stood outside a warehouse it had taken him two trains and a very confusing cab ride to even find. The street it was on somehow intersected with itself. Probably Moriarty’s idea of a joke. And though Sherlock was now late, he continued to smoke his way through a cigarette while staring at the place. 

Abandoned. And not the sort of abandoned you could easily repurpose. Not the sort where obviously people were still coming and going because the dirt was all turned up and the locks were still working. Abandoned as in at least half the locks were rusted shut, exactly one of the street lights nearby was even functioning, the grounds were covered in rubbish and the only access gate was very unhelpfully broken while also being blocked by bins for the flats next door. 

Sherlock had eventually resorted to climbing a fence to arrive where he was. He had no idea how Jim could’ve possibly done it any other way. He was starting to question whether it was all a trick, whether Moriarty was just watching videos of this in a hotel suite somewhere, maybe on the other side of the world by now.

Then the lights inside turned on. The windows, covered heavily in dust where they weren’t broken, cast ominous shadows in all directions. Maybe Jim had seen him standing there, thinking about leaving. Maybe Jim was just late too.

He stubbed out the cigarette on the nearest pile of rubble and made his approach. He wished he hadn’t gotten high on the way there. Small dose or not, Jim hated it when he was high and would know instantly.

After pulling open the door - a screeching of hinges the absolute icing on the cake of this terrible evening - he saw a slight man’s outline standing near the center of a large, empty room. The man was wearing a black suit, expensively cut. Even at a distance, Sherlock knew the shoes were Italian. The man sent a vague wave in his direction — congenial, a little bored, utterly above the gravity of the situation. Never was a gesture more clearly Jim Moriarty. 

Not a trick. He was there. In the same room with him. Sherlock’s throat constricted, threatening mutiny. Odd, the reactions of the body to such slight stimuli.

“Irene Adler sends her love,” Sherlock said. He paced closer and watched the outline become more and more Jim. Jim who wasn’t moving. Jim who was just standing in the warehouse, more empty space behind him than was strategically sound, his hands in his pockets. 

He saw the left side of Jim’s jaw was purple and yellow. His right eye was red and there was a textbook bruising pattern that emanated from his hairline. He’d obviously been slammed against a wall. Having that knowledge made Sherlock’s heart clench uncomfortably.

“Does she?” he asked. The tone was familiar - playful yet disbelieving.

Sherlock answered with the truth. “Actually, what she sends is, quote, ‘Tell Jim his plan better include a second resurrection if he intends to keep drinking like that’ end quote.”

“Kindly tell Irene to stop telling people I have a plan. It does give one _such_ a reputation.” He was mirroring Sherlock’s overly-formal manner of speaking, as a subtle form of mockery. Also familiar. 

Sherlock smiled despite himself. Maybe it was the cocaine but parts of him were feeling very warm. “I would actually love to not be your texting service at all, James,” he said, though he walked closer as he spoke. “You look awful, by the way.”

“ _So do you_ ,” Jim replied. His voice sounded sweet, like he was whispering a compliment in bed. He probably knew the disunity of literal and actual meaning would hurt Sherlock’s drug-addled mind.

Sherlock waited for several seconds, just watching him. He was injured from the fight at the abandoned brothel, more injured than Sherlock had guessed from his voice on the phone, still less than he probably should’ve been given the scene. Aside from the head wound, most of it seemed localized to his left side, the dead men all being right-handed and James being left-handed. There was tape holding some of his fingers together. Sprained, not broken. His hair was overwashed - he’d had trouble getting the blood out. His suit was carefully ironed, but he’d had to send for it. He hadn’t shaved. He was staying somewhere unplanned.

“What is this - what are you doing?” Sherlock asked, after none of Jim’s tells got him anywhere particularly revelatory. Unplanned. Off-book. That was where he’d been before. Exactly what the pile of bodies had told him.

“ _You_ asked to see _me_ , Sherlock.”

Sherlock took a long breath, then a few more steps forward. Jim made no move to back away. He was trying to find meaning in Jim’s eyes, a species of one of the recognizable looks he’d given in the past, anything to indicate that he was dealing with a man, not a monster. He couldn’t find any. His eyes were just two black pools, empty.

“What are you looking for, honey?” Jim beamed at him, an edge of mocking in his tone. The man was only keeping himself upright with incredible difficulty - his lack of movement showed that clearly - and he was still mocking him.

“What’s wrong with you?” Sherlock asked. It wasn’t an accusation - it was a genuine question. They were mere inches apart now and Jim hadn’t shifted away once. His hands were still in his pockets. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He was glowering, studying Sherlock’s face, his movements. Looking for changes. 

“I’ve never been better, my dear,” he said, though his tone didn’t echo the sentiment. He sounded like he was recounting a tragedy. “Entirely dependent on who you ask, of course. There was this erm… thing a year or so ago. This pesky thing where a celebrity detective broke my heart. You know, the same old story.” He laughed idly and his eyes began to roam the large, empty warehouse. After a bit of searching, all the levity of the laugh dropped away like a tire losing pressure, and his eyes found Sherlock again. He didn’t blink. “But I’m all better now, Sherlock.” He measured these last words, gave them each the weight of their meaning.

Sherlock felt himself losing ground. He answered quickly.

“You killed seven people with a knife, five with a gun.”

“Oh goodie a recap,” Jim droned. 

“You didn’t plan any of it. It was a mistake.”

Jim’s eyes widened. “Ohh was it now?” 

“Yes. You never —” Sherlock broke off when Jim’s eyes started roaming freely - lasciviously - over his body. It was a few seconds at most, but it was enough to destabilize him. He had to stutter to continue. “Y-you never do the killing yourself. Not since your twenties. Unless of course the situation requires it.” He watched Jim’s eyes, trying to find anything to hold onto.

Jim just nodded, staring straight through him. There was a tension in his neck that might’ve been anger or physical pain. He couldn’t be sure. He wanted to touch it, ease it, whatever it was. The want might’ve shown in his eyes because Jim smiled at him.

“So?” Jim finally asked.

“So?” Sherlock repeated. He squinted at Jim, unsure what he was getting at, tired of trying to make him clarify himself.

“So… what? Mistake, no mistake.” Jim rolled his eyes. There was a mirthless smile tugging at his lips. “You do realize you’re the only one who’s even _asking_ why?”

“Right, of course, fine.” Sherlock sighed. “I don’t care about the people who died, I care about why you killed them. Are you happy with that? Is that sufficient? Or do I need to add the obvious corollary, which is that I’m worried about you.”

“I’ve told you I’m fine.”

“Yes, James, but you’re lying.”

Jim took a short breath and exhaled it, the shuddering sound that resulted was both amused and frustrated. “I’ve also told you my name is Jim.”

“Why did you even agree to see me if you’re just going to—”

Sherlock’s words were cut short by Jim taking a step forward - a step into a space that didn’t exist - a step that brought their bodies flush together. He made sure he had Sherlock’s gaze, that he held it, unblinking, for a little too long before he said, “To hurt you, Sherlock.”

Sherlock searched his eyes, mildly shocked, mildly comforted by the familiar and long absent sensation of Jim’s body against his. He realized too late that the familiar feeling made him vulnerable - made him desperate to find something in Jim’s eyes, and deeply pained to not see it there.

And then it did hurt. 

It surprised him how much it hurt. Not totally dissimilar from the first time John hit him without prompting, hit him to punish him; but the sensation was colder than that. It ran deeper. It was under his skin. It was in his blood. It made him feel instantly sick.

His mind shorted out for the barest of seconds and then he took a sharp breath and a step backward. 

Jim waited for him to regain himself, then started talking again. “I said I’d burn you. And then for a while, specifically when I was fucking you, I thought maybe I wouldn’t…” He took another step closer, forcing Sherlock back again. “But still, the idea was rather tempting… It’s going to be so _satisfying_ now, you’ll see, when it ends properly.”

“I don’t believe you,” Sherlock said. On his own, he took another step backward, desperate to put more air between them. It just brought Moriarty forward.

“Course you don’t. You never believe me,” said Moriarty. “Wouldn’t make any difference anyway. You know, when you left, something you said kept ringing in my ears. It was really painful.” He gestured to the side of his head - the side with the awful bruising pattern, the side Sherlock still hoped wasn’t fractured.

“I called you a monster,” Sherlock supplied. The memory was clear enough - he didn’t really understand why those precise words had hurt Jim - when he’d said them, he was just groping around for random insults, trying to cause enough pain to make sure Jim didn’t come after him. The only reason he remembered it was the strange, sudden pain on Jim’s face.

Moriarty tilted his head, his eyes coming alive just enough to run over Sherlock again. He nodded.

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock said.

He made a face. “You’re not though.”

Sherlock leaned into the space between them. Jim’s hair smelled floral, feminine. Not his usual shampoo and going on the preferences Sherlock knew him to have, not his shampoo at all. Information that didn’t help anything. “Would it even matter? What can I do? What do you actually want me to do?” He was begging. He didn’t realize it until he heard himself doing it. 

Sherlock could see the rage wash over Moriarty’s face; flames licking up from underneath. A smile broke through it, but it was nothing more than a pathway for oxygen, a necessity to keep the fire stoked to its hottest point. The smile dropped and he grabbed Sherlock’s shirt, hauled him closer by a fistful of fabric.

His eyes were pitch black, staring at Sherlock’s neck and shoulder, as if he couldn’t bear to look at him. “I don’t care what you do,” he hissed. 

Moriarty let go. Released, Sherlock’s legs seemed not to be working; they buckled under him and he ended up dazed and on his knees.

He expected to be teased for it, to be told the drug habit made him weak, but Jim said nothing. From the sounds above him, he seemed to be having trouble getting a full breath. He couldn’t bring himself to raise his eyes and look; he could feel Jim staring down at him.

Jim’s body moved away, stepped past him, Jim’s shoes clicking and echoing loudly in the dirty, empty space. Then that awful screeching sound again — the door being opened, and the door swinging shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry. It's not the end. Should be a Moriarty chapter next unless something goes terribly awry.  
> Comments would be very welcome, btw.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so, I changed the thing to 'explicit' for this chapter.  
> Warning: some very mature content ahead. Sex, you guys. Please don't continue unless that's okay.  
> Also, suicidal thoughts and some mild internalized homophobia.

Sherlock barely made it as far as the first tube station before using the last of his cocaine. 

When he thought about returning home, he felt visceral disgust. His flat would be at once too quiet and too loud. His experiments were all at dead ends, he’d certainly be yelled at by John and talked down to by Mycroft, and Irene would be duplicitous and vague while her eyes saw everything he was hoping at the moment to disguise.

He ended up wandering an utterly dead London where he didn’t see so much as a pickpocket. The drugs were the only things pulling their weight anymore, and they were barely doing that. 

Jim’s eyes — one of them a painful red just at the corner. Jim’s nearly broken fingers — still strong enough to grab him forcefully by his shirtfront. Jim’s body — unsteady, probably half purple under his suit but just stubborn enough to remain ambulatory. Jim’s clicking shoes as he walked away — the pattern of his steps just slightly wrong, slightly hitched, slightly not his usual rhythm and favoring the wrong side. Jim’s eyes again. Because it was always Jim’s eyes.

He knew he was being manipulated into worrying about him. At the exact same time that he was being rejected by him. It was infuriating and it was completely working. 

His hands were on his phone before he could stop himself.

_In case you’re unaware, you have a broken rib. SH_

He sent the text, felt disgusted with himself and didn’t look for a response. 

He was in a gay club, in a fairly dark corner, barely any idea how he’d gotten there. The music, probably. In his present state, he felt like a moth to the throbbing rhythm, the pulsing lights. But maybe it was the need to be touched, too, to be touched enough to go blank, because now the drugs weren’t doing their job either, and he was certainly allowing himself to be touched. A man’s hands were on his torso, tugging at the shirt he’d worn specifically for Jim. His coat was… somewhere. A coat check? Could a place like this have a coat check? It wasn’t on his body.

Hands were on his body. Something he hadn’t felt in ages. They were running up, then down, then further down. Sherlock grabbed the man’s neck, a bit roughly, made him turn his face upward. 

Through flashes of neon light, he saw why he’d picked him; he was close to Jim’s height, had strong-looking arms, dark hair, large but unfortunately blue eyes. It was probably too much to ask for — that he’d have eyes like tipping into a black hole, or for him to be Irish, or for him to be clinically insane.

The man was on his toes, kissing him, hands gripping his shoulders, pressing him hard against the wall. He could feel the man’s erection against his hip. He closed his eyes, his tongue in another man’s mouth. The stimulus was very similar but not identical, the response much farther removed, but still comparable. It didn’t set his entire body on fire like Jim’s mouth. It was rather like being lightly electrocuted.

“Would you like to come back to mine?” the man asked. English, very posh. Very disappointing.

Sherlock nodded. He couldn’t bear to hear himself agree. 

“Did I have a coat?” he asked.

The man laughed, a laugh nothing like Jim’s laugh. The opposite, if such a thing were possible. “Yes. Do you need help finding it?”

Sherlock nodded again. 

The man kissed him again. Static electricity at most. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He disappeared into the throng, was back in anywhere from five minutes to seven hours with Sherlock’s coat. 

Sherlock slipped it on, hands going to his pockets. Somehow they were already outside. The man was hailing a cab. He’d found his phone in the pocket. His phone and a slip of paper he couldn’t remember putting there. Something he couldn’t read. His mind was shuttering itself.

Then back at the man’s flat, somehow, seemingly mere seconds later. An expensive flat. Sherlock was on his back, his shirt was off. The man was kissing him and undoing his belt.

“My name is Felix, by the way,” he said.

“Please stop talking,” Sherlock answered. 

When Felix stopped doing more than that, stopped kissing his chest and just stared down at him like he was insane, Sherlock could only sigh. The cessation wasn’t helping things any more than that accent.

He ran a hand through his hair, stared up at the ceiling, and said irritably, “Oh, it’s not you, it’s just your accent and your voice and… Yes, when I say it out loud, yes, I suppose it’s a bit you.”

Felix was looking down at him, flushed, breathing heavily and now deeply perplexed. Then he just laughed. It was a joyless, stupid laugh. He was arrogant as well as rich and he apparently assumed Sherlock was joking. Convenient. Irritating, but convenient.

“Do you want a blow job first?” Felix asked.

Sherlock shook his head. “No - do you?” 

Evidently the answer was yes, and probably the reason Felix had asked his question in the first place, because he just started taking off his clothes.

Sherlock settled himself on the floor between Felix’s legs, felt hands in his hair urging him forward. Felix’s penis was smaller than Jim’s. He’d expected that. Jim’s was annoyingly not proportionate to his height. 

He wetted his lips, took it into his mouth. He expected to lose his erection the second it passed his lips but he didn’t. The weight on his tongue was comforting, the taste wasn’t terrible. The careful thrusts toward his throat and the featherlight tugs on his hair were frankly endearing compared to what Jim did. Jim would get jealous of god knows what if Sherlock stopped looking at him for too long. He’d pull his curls like a schoolyard bully.

“Hey,” Felix was saying. He gently pushed Sherlock backwards, onto his heels. “Are you alright, babe?”

“Of course I am. Why?” Sherlock snapped.

“Because you’re crying?”

Sherlock touched his cheek and discovered it was wet. He stared at his hand.

“Would you like to — It would be fine if we—” Felix kept trailing off, apparently unable to quite pronounce the word ‘stop.’

Sherlock started taking off his trousers. 

“If I start doing it again, just ignore me,” he said, stiffly. 

“Oh, thank God,” said Felix. 

Felix kept talking but Sherlock wasn’t listening. Sherlock was returning to the bed, naked, with Felix following him. He needed quiet, he needed to stop thinking, he needed Jim out of his head. 

Jim, who was an arsehole at every conceivable opportunity, who was nothing but hard edges, one right after the next. Jim, who was hardly ever gentle in bed, only when he was about to come, or right after. Then he was like something fine and delicate with the top layer of rust scraped away. Then he would curl closer, kiss Sherlock’s neck, his shoulder, like they were lovers, like they weren’t just enemies fucking to pass the time. His fingers would ghost over Sherlock’s body like he was afraid to break him.

He pictured Jim’s face when Felix entered him, could picture literally nothing else. It was still where his mind went when he was in any piqued state. If he was too high, nearly dead, aroused, hurt, overstimulated — it was always Jim’s face. He used to think it was a fear reaction. Now he knew Jim was where he went for comfort. 

Felix was moving inside him, slow thrusts while holding his hips still. The angles were wrong, the rhythm was wrong, the girth and length were equally wrong, but nor did he want any of it to stop. Every thrust raised his temperature, made him less present, sent his racing thoughts down a torrent of crashing falls.

Venice. A masked face in the crowd. Strange though, looking directly at him, then gone behind a rush of tourists. He’d been hiding there for nearly a month. One of his old drug contacts had left a place — abandoned, but livable. He’d been fine. He was alive. His friends were alive. Jim was —

That bottomless feeling. 

Jim was dead. He’d shot himself in the mouth. Right in front of him. He’d left the game entirely. He was dead. Sometimes Sherlock woke up at night retching, the gunshot still ringing in his ears.

He heard himself cry out. It must have sounded like a moan of pleasure because Felix didn’t stop, didn’t even stop talking. Something about ‘beautiful,’ something about ‘hot arse,’ something about ‘all day.’ 

“Shut up, please shut up,” he heard himself groan. He turned his head, sweaty curls falling in his eyes, and he struggled to get back to Jim. But Felix was lifting him, an arm hooked under his shoulder to pull him back against his chest. It changed the angle inside him; he shuddered and dropped his head back against Felix’s shoulder. 

He felt boneless and weak.

Felix rocked his hips upward and Sherlock moaned.

A man who wasn’t Jim was doing this to him. He felt disgusting. He felt like nothing.

There was a masked face in the crowd. Jim had followed him to Venice. Jim was alive.

_Jim is alive. Jim is alive. Jim is alive._

It rolled through him, repeating like a mantra as his body was pushed closer and closer to release. 

And yet. The way he’d been feeling, walking around the city. That bottomless feeling. The feeling that Jim wasn’t just leaving him, but was disappearing. That Jim was a dying star at the edge of collapse. 

He saw Jim’s eyes - staring at him, empty of anything recognizable - and he came.

 

Sebastiana had driven them out of the city and they were still heading north; the view through the window now was very dark and very boring. 

Jim had loosened his tie, removed the jacket entirely. He’d also taken another pill for the pain, though it was doing very little except dropping him into strange and irregular intervals of sleep — pained bouts of sleep like previews of hell. It was almost enough to make him embrace the inevitable, a bit earlier than necessary. To just make it all stop.

And it would be just as well, really. The plan didn’t exactly need him anymore. And he didn’t know how much longer he could go on like this anyway. Seconds after leaving Sherlock on his knees, he’d felt a yawning emptiness just past his sternum, a growing, bone-deep incapacity. Now his face could barely form anything. No masks, no covers, barely even a translation of what was inside.

When he felt the vibration of Sherlock’s text against his leg, he briefly stirred. For some reason he started thinking about their time together in Odessa. They’d barely seen any of the city. Pretty much just the inside of their hotel room. He longed to stay asleep, where Sherlock both was and wasn’t, where try as he might Jim couldn’t get close enough to hurt him. It was hours later when he finally awoke to text back.

_In case you’re unaware, you’re a drug addict. JM_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah... so two things: I said that this was gonna be a Jim chapter and then it hardcore was not. Sorry about that. Also I feel like I should apologize for hooking Sherlock up with someone else even if he's just a proxy for Jim. All I can say is: Sherlock is spinning out pretty hard at the moment and fuck knows what Jim is gonna do about any of this honestly.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And behold the long promised Jim chapter!

Jim was awake. He vaguely regretted not killing his aunt and stealing her bed the night previous, but he was awake. His eyes adjusted as he lay on his back, roamed to Sebastiana, who was asleep in a ball on the floor. She was using her own arm as a pillow, no blanket to speak of. Then, the coffee table in front of him. The family pictures that used to be on the wall were stacked there. He must’ve done that himself. He had the barest sense he’d planned to burn them and then fallen asleep on the couch.

In the one nearest him, he held a science trophy and had a big, stupid grin on his face; in the background, his father looked on, an arm tightly around his mother, whose eyes were wide in something that was not entirely surprise. 

He showered. His face looked better, his eye was barely red now. He noticed with deep ambivalence that the bruising all over his body was less. His hand could make a fist without pain. 

He pulled another suit from the dry-cleaning bag and managed to dress himself with only brief intervals of leaning against the wall for balance. When he tried, he could manage a deep breath.

He was healing, maybe even down to his heart. He stared in the mirror as he thought that through; his eyes widened in something that was not entirely surprise. 

His mind still felt like a crater, still numb and slow and at least half in London after what he’d done to Sherlock. But the rest of him: healing. The sheer reckless self-destruction of a natural order that would heal him despite his complete disinterest in getting well, despite what he was capable of doing with a healthy body. The world deserved what it got.

He returned to the living room to find everyone still asleep. When he went outside, the sun was high, lighting every obnoxious corner of the sleepy, irrelevant little village he was hiding in. His skin didn’t burst into flames beneath it; he knew himself able to touch both a cross and a bible without bodily pain. 

If he was a demon, as his father so often claimed towards the end, he was evidently of the invulnerable sort, unburdened with poetic weaknesses. 

Unless, of course, you counted Sherlock.

 

“Would you answer me if I asked about your scars?” Sherlock had asked him once.

Sherlock was in his bed at the time, three minutes at most since Jim had rolled off of him, lying on his back because he refused to be spooned. His own body was curled towards him but not touching, not strictly allowed to yet. It was early after he’d found him in Venice.

Jim had been nearly asleep but he'd shaken himself at the question. Sherlock was usually quiet after, self-loathing. This marked a change. A change was interesting — a change was an opportunity.

He reached out and trailed his fingertips along Sherlock’s arm and he wasn’t batted away. Like completing a circuit, he felt instantly more awake; he could see in Sherlock’s eyes that he felt more comfortable.

“Which ones, honey?” he asked, lightly.

“The old ones.”

He realized what Sherlock meant at a slight delay. Then he chuckled. “Ohh. I don’t know,dear, why don’t you ask me and see?”

He watched Sherlock roll his eyes. Evidently he was put out already, just phrasing the question at a remove. Probably because he was fighting so hard not to sound concerned.

“I won’t get angry,” he added. He poked at Sherlock’s side, then let his hand trail along his stomach.

“Of course you won’t,” Sherlock answered stiffly. “You’re recently sated. That’s why I’m asking now.”

“You… still… haven’t… asked,” Jim teased.

Sherlock twitched, then spoke in a rush. “You were prepubescent when you got them. They feel like whip marks, but not made with a whip, with something flat-edged.”

“Yes, good. Very good,” Jim said evenly. He was watching Sherlock’s skin react to his fingers. “None of it a question though.”

Sherlock huffed petulantly. He nearly rolled away, but at the last second he thought better of it and just turned his head to the side. Jim could see a blush rising in his neck; he’d enjoyed the praise, was saving and cataloguing it, was ever-so-slightly repressing the way it made him feel.

Several minutes passed in which Jim’s arm was still allowed around Sherlock’s waist, his hand still allowed to trace patterns in his skin.

“Your father?” Sherlock finally asked. He bit the question off. Again, he was trying to hide the concern, now behind a wall of irritation. Again, Jim was amazed by how good the concern felt. Concern about something he’d barely thought about in fucking decades, but concern. It was spreading over him like heat. It made him feel strong. It felt healing.

He chuckled in response. “Yes, obviously,” he said. “Was that really so hard?”

Sherlock didn’t answer. A moment later, he took Jim’s hand and turned on his side. He tugged lightly for Jim to move closer. Presumably he would’ve been ashamed to hear himself ask.

Jim came forward at the tug, of course. He hugged the gangly, impossible frame against his chest and his mind calmed further, stopped racing from point to point, stopped seeing a million irrelevant details in every stitch of the bedspread, every bump of misapplied paint on the wall. 

He rested his forehead against Sherlock’s back, reveling in the cessation, the peace. When he pressed a kiss to the apex point of Sherlock’s spine, he swore he could feel it at the same point on his own skin. This was the calmest he’d ever felt.

 

Jim noted a collection of cottages just past the garden wall. They each had lawn ornaments on prominent display — fairies and frogs mostly, one gnome. 

He pulled a duffle bag from the boot of the car, hefted it over his shoulder to avoid using his left hand, then grabbed his computer bag from the back seat.

Only when he returned to the house did he think to check his phone. Irene had started texting him hours ago.

 

_We don’t know where Sherlock is. IA_

_Jim, do you know where Sherlock is? IA_

 

He dropped both bags on the coffee table. The picture frames scattered; several went crashing to the floor. The dish of caramels was crushed to shards.

 

_Mycroft believes you’ve kidnapped Sherlock. He’s asking for your ransom demands and says money is no object. Please respond as quickly as possible. IA_

 

Jim stared at his phone. He felt cold fear course down his spine. It was the first solid emotion he’d felt all morning.

His face was blank while his mind raced. A million scenarios occurred to him but he shook his head to clear them away. He typed quickly.

 

_He was alive enough to text me a little after midnight. Check his lab, emergency rooms, hospitals, known drug dens, morgues. The elder Holmes is more than welcome to pay me for that fairly obvious advice, though I suspect Venmo might be a bit beyond his mental capacity. JM_

 

He watched for the three dots to appear beneath the text. They didn’t. He went on waiting, unblinking. His mind flashed to Sherlock’s body collapsed in a drug den, dead from an overdose.

 

“Is your mother still alive?” Sherlock had asked. Interrogation after sex had become a pattern by then. He’d long since deduced James Moriarty Sr. was gone, the scars on Jim’s back not spanning enough years.

Jim was silent. Sherlock’s shoulder was under his chin, his back against his chest, his own chest shivering under Jim’s caresses.

“Don’t ask me that again,” he answered, after a time. He didn’t want Sherlock’s questions to stop — not at all, it was good for him to have a project and so much the better if the project was him — he just wasn’t about to answer that one.

“She’s not then,” Sherlock answered, undeterred. “Did you kill her, too?”

Jim hummed a faint tune and started pressing kisses along Sherlock’s throat. When the trail reached his shoulder, he bit down hard. Hard enough to draw blood, though he hadn’t exactly intended to.

 

“Is that my gun?”

The voice made him jump.

Sebastiana’s head was poking up from the other side of the coffee table; her short hair was sticking up at odd angles. Though neither of her eyes appeared to be open, her nose was trained on the duffle bag.

“Of course it’s your gun, what else would it be?” Jim grumbled at her. His tone was calmer than it probably should’ve been, given a large part of his mind was contemplating homicide. Whoever’s fault this was. Whoever had hurt Sherlock. Whoever could be reasonably blamed besides himself, who was already being punished, and endlessly.

“Please don’t drop my gun,” she muttered. Now he could hear the American accent more clearly. American military.

Her head disappeared again, evidently returning to sleep. 

Finally Irene texted back. 

 

_Of course_ _I already checked those places, dear. Not in any of the morgues. I think I might have found him. Please stand by. Oh, and code chartreuse by the way. IA_

 

Jim sighed, not in relief but in extended exasperation. Being found wasn’t necessarily being alive and Irene thinking something didn’t make it fact. Also, code chartreuse for fuck's sake.

He stared, waited, listened to Sebastiana’s breathing as it became even. The house was still around him, the only light was cast in from outside. Outside there were cats meowing loudly; they were circling the house.

When he hadn’t heard from Irene five minutes later, something in him bent — something that usually would’ve snapped. The calm he felt as he moved around the coffee table was of a strange and unfamiliar sort. It felt distinctly more dangerous than rage. Rage was sharp and immediate, shallow. This, whatever it was, went miles deeper. 

He nudged Sebastiana’s shoulder with the toe of his shoe.

“Wake up,” he said. His voice was soft and a little bit playful but it was recognizably an order. “You have to go to London.” 

She blinked up at him with large eyes, acclimating for several seconds. Evidently, unless it was about her gun she had nothing to say.

“You have to go get Irene,” he said. 

Even in the dim light he could see what that did —the immediate alertness, the hue of her eyes changing temperature.

“Seems she blew her cover early,” he said. “Come on then, up up up.”

Sebastiana was up before the sentence was out. She was checking the duffle bag, seemed to be inspecting her sniper rifle for scratches before she slung the pack over her shoulder. Any other day, he would’ve been impressed. She didn’t even require an order to know they were moving up the London strike as well. Logical. A logical, lesbian sniper for the United States military — no wonder she’d defected.

She was on her way out the door a moment later and Jim followed behind.

“How long have you been driving on the left side?” He muttered, their feet crunching gravel. The sky above them was an inferno.

She shrugged but didn’t turn. “It’s not hard.” They were at the car. The bag holding her rifle went in the backseat.

She moved to the driver’s side door and pulled it open, then hesitated — an action only visible in the sudden halt of motion and tightening of her jaw. The rest of her was expressionless.

“Where?” she asked. A monotone. The real question was implied.

“Not sure yet,” he answered. “Just do the other bit first while she sorts herself out. Keep your phone on.”

Sebastiana just nodded and ran a hand through her hair. Exactly one motion, spare as anything, but enough to flatten the mess. 

“Sir,” she said. It was an affirmative. She asked no more questions, just climbed into the car and started the engine.

He rapped a brief tune on the window before she could pull away. When she dutifully rolled it down, he put both hands on the frame and leaned close. His jaw was set and angry, his tone was light. 

“Oh, and one more thing. I should warn you.” He waited until she looked at him. He let his face be what it was — raw, violent, unhesitating, the still eye at the center of chaos. He needed her to know he was serious, after all. It was the courteous thing. 

“If you hurt Sherlock in any way, for any reason,” he started. He surprised himself with the pique of emotion in his voice. Whatever state he was in now, it was shifting from one moment to the next. “I’ll pull out your eyes, I’ll break your arms, I’ll break your legs, and I’ll drop you like that in the North Sea.” 

When she didn’t answer right away, he realized she might be questioning his specificity, so he added with a shrug, “Honestly, I already have the boat.”

He didn’t let go of the car. 

Finally, she gave an affirmative “Sir.” Her voice was a bit clipped, but admirably unshaken.

He stepped back, testing and stretching his bruised jaw as he went. It made a popping sound, but it moved better than the day before. When she backed the car up, he waved lightheartedly, like his daughter was going on a school trip.

She hadn’t even pulled around the first corner when his phone started ringing. 

 

_Whether you’re a mother or whether you’re a brother you’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive_

_Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’, we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive_

 

He hesitated to answer. 

The news could be anything. Everything had to burn to be reborn.

 

_Life goin’ nowhere. Somebody help me. Somebody help me, yeah._

 

He finally answered, just as the voicemail was about to pick up.

“Yes?” he said.

There was a long pause while Irene spoke. A black cat cleared the nearest stone wall. It walked straight up to Jim’s motionless form and rubbed against his leg.

He stayed silent for a full minute after she finished speaking, after she told him that Sherlock was alive, was currently going through withdrawals, that Irene had found him half-naked in another man’s bed, and that the other man was currently out buying him more cocaine.

“Alriiight…” he said, finally. 

He couldn’t entirely disentangle his own voice from the sound of blood rushing in his ears, but he thought he sounded stable enough. Irene’s response gave the impression that she disagreed. She started talking very rapidly about Sherlock’s cocaine dependency. She sounded so worried he eventually had to cut her off.

“Stop, shut up, I don’t care that he’s not well. Stop telling me this part.” He pressed a hand to his brow, rubbed at a twinge that was almost all he could feel. When she tried to interrupt him again, he shouted so loudly the nearest tree cleared of birds. “ _Do you think I’m well, Irene?!_ ”

 

Irene blanched and fell silent. She looked over her shoulder. Sherlock was still where he’d been - didn’t seem to have heard Jim’s voice through the double paned glass lining the balcony. Around him, the man’s flat was truly horrendous. Decorated in the self-congratulatory taste of those born wealthy and bored out of their minds by the ease of existence. Gold sconces and the etchings of Picasso, hideous busts, shelves upon shelves of unopened, unread books. The view was a near-panorama of London.

“Dear…” she began, once it seemed Jim was done. “I’m quite aware you’re _not_ well. That’s precisely why I’m concerned.”

Jim’s voice came back in a grumble. “Seb’s on her way. She can meet you at the extraction point whenever. Just tell me when it’s clear.”

“Jim,” she said quickly, hoping to preempt the hang-up she could hear in his voice. He gave her an impatient growl to indicate he was still there. “Are you coming to London?”

“Why? Because Sherlock’s finally fucked someone who’s neither of us? I’m not a child, Irene,” he answered. Somewhere near him a cat was meowing and birds were chirping. Some of the tension left her shoulders. 

“Ah, good then.” She strained to hear what was happening around him. It sounded like a door closing. “I’m sure I can sort this. Perhaps a… brief stay in a rehabilitation facility would—”

“Erm, if you think that’s best, dear. But it’s plan 8F now, so, you know, place your feet accordingly,” he said. There was a hard edge under the feigned lightness of his voice. Her blood ran cold.

A moment later she could hear him typing. The nature sounds had stopped. She held the phone away from her mouth and took a deep, calming breath. 

She could just see the top of the London eye. She loved the city, despite its flaws. There were a few good things there, and there were even more exciting things there. Plan 8F would endanger a decent portion of them, if not burn them straight to the ground. 

She knew she mustn’t panic. She mustn’t spook him into acting even more erratically. “You’ve been sending me 8G for a week, darling,” she answered calmly. “You said yourself 8F was too chaotic. That the violence would put him at risk.”

“Adjust,” he said, and the line went dead. 

Irene felt the panic start in her hands, felt it creep up her arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, yeah, a lot happening in this chapter. It probably has a few rough edges I need to smooth down, sorry about that.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've edited this AT LEAST once now. The second part has been bothering me. Should have a new chapter pretty soon.

Sherlock’s heartbeat pulsed through his fingertips as he raced across another canal in Venice. The sun had turned — it was well into the afternoon now and the colors were beginning to match the occasion — a lurid echo of the Carnival of Venice, which had actually ended a month ago, but whose detritus still littered odd corners, floated in eddies under bridges.

It left behind one masked figure as well, who was now fleeing along a very strange, specific path as Sherlock pursued. Almost certainly a trap, whoever it was. But then Sherlock was beginning to suspect self-preservation was a wildly overrated trait. So much time spent doing nothing just to be safe. It was soul-crushing.

He’d seen the masked man come this way. He’d just seen him disappear down an alley. And Christ, he realized how tight the alley was when he squeezed in after him: less an alley than an accidental space between two buildings. 

And the space only narrowed further, quickly making Sherlock turn sideways to keep moving forward. He could see narrowing daylight all the way through to the other side, an other side that frankly seemed impassable, but somehow the mystery man had vanished between here and there. 

There had to be a turn up ahead. If only he could make it far enough.

His hands ran across the rough stone, ducked just in time to avoid hitting a windowsill. He gasped when he heard a distinct patter of footsteps echoing ahead — in a space he’d been anticipating as a doorway. It was getting darker by the second - all the sunlight cast in was from far above, barely filtering down. It felt like a sepulcher.

His heart stopped when he heard a beckoning whistle, coming from the same spot, just a bit further along. Not a doorway, then: an opening, an adjoining alley, something large enough to hold a man.

Before he could see whomever he’d been following, he paused with his fingers on the wall, holding his breath.

_Jim is dead. You’re just losing your mind._

He thought ‘ _please_ ’ anyway as he turned the corner.

The relief hit him like a train.

Jim was standing there, casually facing him in the dim light. He had one hand in his pocket, the other holding the mask he’d been wearing in the city. Behind him, a few feet of space and a dead end.

Sherlock heard himself whisper “ _Moriarty._ ” His shoulders dropped; his entire being loosened. He felt his knees almost give out beneath him and he staggered slightly to the side, where he braced himself against a wall.

Jim watched, no movement but a slight head oscillation, a peering shift of his eyes. He must’ve known everything then. What his death had done, what it continued to do.

Maybe it gave him the slightest amount of pause, or remorse. Maybe it made him deliriously happy. Maybe it turned him on.

In a light voice, he said, “ _Ta da._ ” 

Locking eyes with Sherlock, he tossed the mask behind him like it was a stray bit of rubbish. Then he walked closer, slowly, dragging his hand along the wall as he went. 

“I know, I know, the production value’s not at all what we’re used to… ” he started, his voice playing lightly on the air. _His voice._ Sherlock hadn’t realized how much he’d missed that voice. Shifting and falling, amused one second and terrifying the next, a story told from seven different angles and alternating at random. Beautiful. So difficult to parse intentions from it.

Jim paused both walking and speaking, looked down and chewed on the inner part of his lip. A tell, but a conscious tell because Jim was conscious of everything, so a mockery of a tell. 

He went on, “But I missed you, my dear, and… I suppose I got impatient.” He laughed and shot Sherlock a smile. It was somehow penetrating and self-deprecating both; a smile that might’ve been flirtatious, that might’ve presaged violence. It made Sherlock lean against the wall for support.

He knew he should be afraid. Consciously, he knew that. Self-preservation though. His attachment to it had seemingly worn to nothing.

Jim came closer than necessary, much closer, and Sherlock made no move to back away. Jim’s fingers barely skimmed the front of Sherlock’s coat; he was holding himself back from making contact. His face was unreadable beyond being consciously guarded, a grin plastered on top. He was clean-shaven. He looked healthy, but he was tired, maybe jet-lagged. He had access to most of his usual products, he’d gotten a haircut a week ago, his personal grooming routine was uninterrupted, he was wearing a new suit, bespoke, not made in Italy. At a guess, he hadn’t been in town very long, but it was mostly a guess.

More importantly, no bullet had passed his lips, only the barrel of a gun. A blank? A misfire? He wanted to ask, but he couldn’t even swallow. They were as close as they’d been on the roof. He could smell a very light cologne, the herbal citrus scent of Jim’s shampoo. Very faintly, he could smell gunpowder. There was a switchblade in his left front pocket. If Jim tried to kill him here, now, he’d succeed without question. Running in that tight space wouldn’t be possible; his height would put him at a distinct disadvantage and he’d stupidly brought no weapons.

“Did you miss _me_?” Jim asked. The lightness in his voice had dropped away somewhere in the approach. Now it was almost toneless and a little bit irritated. Probably because Sherlock had yet to speak beyond the bare statement of his surname. 

Still Sherlock felt too numb to do anything else.

Meanwhile Jim’s eyes put on a show of idly roaming his face, as if bored and just needing something to do. But Sherlock knew well enough there was nothing idle about it, never anything idle about Jim Moriarty.

His body sagged into Jim’s gravity by degrees as he watched Jim make note of every change since the roof, make judgments, probably feel disappointment. And he could see it all happening again, right here and now. Another concealed gun. Another pull of another trigger. 

He was overcome by a sudden instinct to stop it — the horror he’d seen over and over again on a constant loop in his dreams. It couldn’t happen again. Something had to prevent it, something had to change. He leaned down, one hand hesitating at the side of Jim’s face, too uncertain to touch him, and he kissed him on the mouth. 

Jim was still for a fraction of a second. Then his left hand locked like a vice at the side of Sherlock’s neck and he kissed back, surging forward with his entire body. 

He turned Sherlock and pushed him against the wall, lay bodily against him as he pressed increasingly aggressive kisses to his mouth. The hand not on Sherlock’s neck wound up into his hair. For the briefest moment he caught Sherlock’s bottom lip in his teeth. It sent something down Sherlock’s spine he’d never felt before, like an electric current, and when Jim’s mouth came back, his tongue was twisting past the vague resistance of Sherlock’s lips. It was all at once like fire, spreading rapidly, going to places that were nowhere near his mouth. 

It was an absolutely unbearable amount of sensation.

He pushed Jim back, but not in time to prevent a small, helpless moan escaping his throat.

It must’ve affected Jim similarly, because he fell back looking dumbstruck; then, with a curse that sounded furious, he took an entire step away, stood there with vivid, unmasked violence on his face for several long seconds until some break in his resolve brought him back, made his face bury itself in Sherlock’s neck, made his hands clench a death grip onto Sherlock’s coat as his entire body shook with an emotion Sherlock had no ability whatsoever to interpret.

Sherlock’s hands hesitated over him, uncertain where it was safe to touch him. He felt a physical pain in his chest, something aching and raw. He also felt fear, finally, breaking through everything else at odd intervals, mostly muffled but then suddenly sharp. Fear of Jim, but another fear underneath that, too.

“That was a spectacularly bad idea, Sherlock,” Jim muttered, eventually.

Sherlock nodded and tilted his head back against the wall, an angle to protect himself from Jim’s eyes, which he could suddenly feel staring up at him.

It was worse than a bad idea, it hadn’t even been an idea. It was an action with no connection to thought, just the dumb movements of a grieving body.

“You’re a complete idiot, I can’t believe how much time I’ve wasted on you,” Jim said. He spoke flatly, insults with no nuance whatsoever, purely intended to hurt him, to get a reaction. His hands roamed inside Sherlock’s coat. They groped around in there with no apparent direction, just moving against his body, seeking nothing in particular beyond more contact.

Sherlock took an unsteady breath. He could feel the heat and weight of Jim’s body against him; Jim’s muscles tensing, trying to contain something that evidently kept trying to break free. Sherlock realized, suddenly, that Jim was practically begging him to speak, that his silence was effectively torturing him.

He cleared his throat. He forced his voice to be even, though the words felt oddly spaced as they came out. “Whereas your hands now — what they’re doing — I suppose that’s a clever plan.”

Sherlock glanced down to see Jim’s eyes shift from dull frustration to something impossibly light, to see Jim’s mouth crack into a smile that would’ve been worth anything, even Jim leering at him seconds later with an even sharper focus than before. 

“God, look at you. You have so many questions you’re not asking. Isn’t that painful?” Jim asked, squinting as if trying to make sense of a blurry image.

“Yes, actually,” Sherlock answered.

“What’s top of the list? Something about your boyfriend? Or is it the brother?” Jim’s eyes sparkled as he went on mockingly. “ _Please, Jim, tell me they’re safe, I’ll do anything to protect them._ ” It was plainly a dare. To do something about it. To yell at him, to fight him, to beg him, to form any sort of reaction at all.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. He grabbed Jim’s tie in one hand, leaned down and took his mouth again.

Jim’s mouth. Jim shifting and fighting back against the hold on his tie, looking for a stance that gained him the dominant position while not once trying to break the kiss. 

His right hand versus Jim’s left; it should’ve been a stalemate, but Jim won quickly thanks to the thorough distraction caused by his tongue. It had been a tactical error, to give him that weapon. One twist around his own tongue and Sherlock was aching and losing control of his extremities. 

Jim kept the wrist he’d won, trapped in his grip as he leaned against Sherlock hard, hard enough to make it difficult to do anything but gasp into Jim’s mouth and feel the erection pressing against his hip.

Finally, Jim let him breathe; their lips parting, no further space granted between them.

“I’ve killed people for so much less than that, darling,” he said. His voice was steady, utterly composed, discordant with the thundering pace Sherlock could feel pounding against his chest. His eyes were empty, staring, boring holes straight through his skull.

“I suppose that knife in your pocket is meant for me,” Sherlock managed to say. There was only a slight quaver in his voice. 

He did not intend the euphemism, and only noticed it when Jim laughed in response. He let go of Sherlock’s wrist before leaning to his ear and whispering, “ _It’s always for you, Sherlock_.”

When Sherlock felt Jim’s teeth scraping against his neck, he panicked and shoved him away again, more forcefully than the time before.

There wasn’t far to go, of course. Jim’s back hit the opposite wall with a dull thud, his hands raised in the air, his eyes leveling Sherlock with quiet derision. Facing each other across the width of the space, there was just enough air for them to not touch, but only just. 

Sherlock struggled to catch his breath, to regain his bearings, to stop feeling like he should run. The longer Jim stood there, visibly choosing not to touch him, to not hurt him, the more the panic subsided.

Eventually, Jim’s stance lost its tension. His eyes dropped their judgment and they raked down Sherlock’s body instead. He raised his hands higher, more consciously, now in supplication.

At Sherlock’s nod, he moved against him again, slotting where he’d been before. Jim took an unsteady breath and slid the coat off Sherlock’s shoulders, let it drop to the ground. He ran a hand into Sherlock’s hair, gripped the curls lightly, then more roughly, as he slowly rocked his weight against him.

Sherlock watched the tension running through Jim’s neck, down his back. The gorgeous control that held him contained, that made him wait, that would make him stop if Sherlock pushed him away again. He put his hand on Jim’s neck, stroked along his skin cautiously, felt Jim’s pulse against his fingers as they ran through his hair.

As Jim’s mouth grazed along Sherlock’s throat, he tsked softly and said, “ _Someone_ didn’t even bring a weapon. Unless I’m supposed to believe that’s a gun.”

Sherlock made a slight sound of discomfort. He felt like telling Jim he was only doing this for him — that he wasn’t even gay, that he just _had to see what would happen._

Jim wasn’t looking at him. He was tugging Sherlock shirt from his trousers. A minute later he was telling him to turn around.

He’d never had a man inside him, nor was he entirely certain it was the way he’d prefer to be with a man, given the choice, but whatever Jim wanted, whatever he was so desperately trying to contain, whatever was causing that tension he could still taste on his tongue, whatever that felt like uncoiled — that was what they were going to do. 

 

Irene staring down at him as he lay on his back, feeling like he absolutely would never be able to get up again. He could hear a voice in his head calling him a drama queen. It might’ve been John’s voice, it sounded like John’s voice. He didn’t care. He just wanted to lie there and drift into a blissful cloud of cocaine the second Felix got back.

“Sherlock, you have to take a shower. We have to go deal with Jim,” Irene was saying.

His eyes rolled to her briefly. He hoped he was expressing how thoroughly unamusing he found that directive. Deal with Jim indeed. 

She’d told Jim about Felix, obviously. Her eyes were saying that now, if her actions upon arrival hadn’t said it loudly enough. So the Jim they now had to deal with would be in an even worse mood than the one he’d attempted to deal with last night, which, as an encounter, had been such an utter failure he was having very real trouble not vomiting over the side of the bed.

Evidently she could read him as well as he could read her. Her eyebrows raised slightly, gracefully even, before she answered his internal monologue.

“He would’ve found out anyway, darling,” she said. There was no apology in her voice. None whatsoever.

He petulantly rolled his eyes back to the ceiling, even as he realized she was technically right. If Felix didn’t already know who Sherlock was, he’d learn, and then he’d talk, because he was the sort who liked attention and because he’d want to brag. Probably the tabloids would know about Jim in a week’s time, too, given the volume at which John liked to yell. All of London would know, soon, that he was like this.

“Hand me my phone,” he answered. 

His eyes found her like a snap when she returned.

She was moving slowly while keeping the phone obscured. She was subtly checking how responsive his pupils were, generally gauging the likelihood that she could delete something without him noticing. And that cloud of disapproval (with James, again, not with himself) was hanging over her darker than before, making every movement a bit sharper, her eyes a little bit redder. By no means a master of interpreting his own feelings, Sherlock was quite familiar with that one.

“Whatever he’s saying, I don’t care,” he grumbled and gestured for the phone in her hand.

She took a long breath. Of course she knew he was lying. He’d barely even tried to sell it. She set the mobile in his open palm.

Twelve texts from Mycroft and John together, asking where he was. He ignored those. A text from Jim calling him a drug addict, which he merely huffed at because that was a fairly unimpressive observation all things considered.

But five new texts from Jim since then, all in the last few minutes.

I

Told

You

So

X

That sharp feeling again. Jim trying to hurt him. He hadn’t been numb enough for it.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose and willed away the nausea. Whatever success he managed to achieve didn’t quite silence the voice in his head. Jim’s voice, from that very, very embarrassing argument they’d had in a very public café in Paris. Jim’s voice, so furious he wasn’t even yelling anymore.

_ “You know what I really hope, Sherlock? I hope someday you let a man you don’t hate fuck you so you’ll stop feeling so confused.” _ 

_I don’t hate you at all, you idiot._

That’s what he’d thought, but chosen not to say. When what he'd chosen to say was: “Stop trying to embarrass me into going home with you.” 

Because that was what James had been doing, at least by half. And because he was so volatile. And because the rules were always so unclear, always so intentionally over his head. And because the longer he stayed with James, the less he felt he could ever go back to London.

 

He opened his eyes and sat up suddenly, finding a second wind in the anger he could taste on his tongue. His messy hair was a halo around his face. His eyes raked over Irene — still the same large coat, her hands in her pockets. She’d at least fixed her hair at this point, but it was still the most obvious thing in the world and he couldn’t imagine how his fool brother hadn’t noticed.

“Tell me right now what’s wrong with him or I will call Mycroft, tell him where you are and that you’re about to flee the city.”

Her jaw somehow dropped without her perfectly sculpted lips ever parting. 

He went on, practically vibrating with petulance and misdirected anger. “Are the rings still with you? How many have you had to sell so far? My guess is two. It’s always so difficult to make it one day to the next when you’ve closed all your accounts and sent your things ahead.”

After the initial shock, Irene just stood there and took his vitriol. She even smiled very slightly, indulgently, like she was dealing with a very insistent pest she didn’t quite have the heart to kick. 

The fear in her eyes was not about him when she turned towards the window. 

“You weren’t able to deduce it yourself, when he was standing right in front of you, dear?” she teased, eyes still kept away as he monitored her. “That’s quite the admission.”

Sherlock's face dropped a bit. A shot to his ego was obvious, ever the weak point, but a comment on his inability to read James… that was. Difficult for him. 

He flexed his jaw in abject irritation. An irritation somehow no longer exclusive to Irene. It permeated everything now. His skin itched with it. His eyes itched with it. The nearest bookcase wasn’t alphabetized. Whoever was in charge of doing the windows - definitely not Felix - had left several, long, arching smudges behind. Irene was aware of every clock in the flat, which meant she was in a hurry, which meant Jim had said something that meant they needed to rush.  Felix had spilled tea leaves on the counter in the kitchen and left a cabinet slightly ajar and he was now certain that he was not wearing his own pants.

He busied himself running fingers through his hair for a few seconds, focusing on that sensation to silence the others. His eyes winced shut, then open again. He picked up his phone and said in a flat voice, “I’m calling him, Irene.”

She turned, finally. There was a look in her eyes he couldn’t quite grasp. Exasperation maybe.

“This was in your pocket,” she said. She handed him a slip of paper — the one he vaguely remembered not being able to read the night before. Now he could see why. It wasn’t written in English script at all. It was written in a cipher, scribbled by Jim’s hand.

He was staring at it, still, his vision a swimming sea of black spots as Irene went on speaking. Her tone was so light it made him want to scream. 

“Suffice it to say he’s going to destroy everything,” she said. “And basically, yes, I think you’re correct to be worried about him, but at the moment we need to be more worried about ourselves.”

He fixed her with a look of profound judgment. If she thought that was more than he could deduce on his own, it was beyond insulting. 

He let the slip of paper drop in his lap and held up the phone in this hand.  He watched her watch as he pressed the green button to call his brother. 

Her eyes widened, marginally, before hardening, again marginally. Ever the survivor, she was quick to react. She spoke quickly. “Jim destroyed your violin. I think that was the first thing he destroyed but it was far from the last.” Her expression became arch then, daring him to cut off her story.

Mycroft’s voice became audible between them. “Sherlock? Brother, are you alright? Where are you?”

Sherlock continued to lock eyes with Irene, tracking her as she sat next to him on the bed. She didn’t glance away once. She was smugly certain that he would need to know the rest.

He answered his brother after an interval, in a voice tightened by mild defeat. “I’m fine, Mycroft. I’m just returning your... messages.”

Mycroft’s voice sounded utterly unlike him. “Sherlock, is he making you say that?”

The question caught him off guard. “Is _who_ making me say _what_?” he asked.

“Is James Moriarty making you say that you’re fine?” Mycroft sounded exceedingly careful in this restatement. His voice was scrubbed clean of its usual condescension. “Has he hurt you?”

Sherlock blinked at Irene in mild shock. The knowing, caustic look she returned clearly said ‘Yes, welcome to my day, dear.’

His throat felt painfully dry when he answered, “No, of course he hasn't.” His hands started shaking. He convulsively touched his hair and turned in on himself before speaking in a quieter voice. He still didn’t want to admit to any of this, let alone parse it for his brother.

“I’m not even with James, Mycroft, and my God, he would never— ” He choked on the words. They rang in his ears anyway. 

_ He would never hurt me.  _

He stammered, “I-I mean, no, I’m perfectly fine, Mycroft. Goodbye.”

When he hung up, he’d already closed his eyes; his face was painfully flushed. He scrubbed at his cheeks with both hands, willing the feeling of shame to go away. To think he’d nearly said something so pathetic.

He couldn’t look at Irene. “Shut up,” he said. He waved a hand towards her. “Keep telling the— the thing.”

He didn’t actually expect her to let it go so easily, but she did, and he could have kissed her for it.

“When I found him in Odessa, he’d destroyed… everything,” she said softly. 

Odessa was the last place they’d been together, the only place they’d ever been more than once. It had been James’s idea, to attempt to reconcile there after their near breakup in Paris. The time Irene was referring to had to be after Sherlock left for good. 

This also would’ve been somewhere around the time he was being tortured in Serbia. 

He sent Irene a sidelong glance; she held his gaze for a second, long enough to silently agree that the wounds from Odessa demanded a degree of reverence. He looked away. 

She continued in a voice that sounded patently gentle. “The entire flat you shared. Books, bookshelves, dishes, tables, the bed frame, the mattress. Honestly, I could barely tell what was there in the beginning, he’d destroyed it all so thoroughly by the time I arrived.”

She started squinting at the ground, as if trying to see something in her mind. He watched her closely and tried to see it too.

“At some point he’d stopped outright destroying and started dismantling, disassembling,” she went on with mild bewilderment in her eyes. “Broken clocks with their gears piled next to them, electronics stripped apart, circuitry everywhere.” She glanced at him then, wasn’t surprised in the least to find him staring at her. “It was almost artistic, Sherlock. I really should’ve taken pictures.”

“Yes, you should have,” he agreed. “But please get to the point.”

Irene sighed. “Well, darling, the best way I can put it is that he’s like that again but on a much larger scale. What you saw in that brothel was nothing. It was a grain of sand on a beach. He's been like that with everything- I’m not sure where it’s going to end.”

He forced himself to stay still for several seconds, to not have a frantic reaction, to think carefully before speaking. He dropped his eyes back to his hands. He toyed the cipher between his fingers, the slip of paper Jim must have dropped in his pocket when he grabbed his shirt, or maybe when their bodies were briefly pressed together. It irked him that he still wasn’t sure, and that the latter sent a phantom warmth over his skin.

The handwriting was specifically chaotic. Jim had about seventeen different styles of handwriting and he’d chosen that one. Handwriting that any textbook would say belonged to a serial killer.

“It’s not that I actually believe he wouldn’t hurt me,” he said, rolling his eyes at himself and the brief stab of embarrassment as it returned. “It’s just that he  _hasn’t_. The man’s tried to kill me more than once, I do know that. I’m not a complete idiot. I haven’t forgotten.”

He ran a hand over his face as he felt it growing hot. Then he looked at her sharply, daring her to tease him. He found her eyes mostly as they’d been before, though the fear there was more recognizable now. It was the same fear he had sitting in his stomach like a rock. That Jim wouldn't survive this.

Something about that recognition only brought back his nausea. He was staring at himself. Someone exactly as unable to fix the situation. What's more, he was interrogating Irene to no actual purpose and they were evidently losing time.

When he spoke again his tone had turned sharp and dismissive. “Though I suppose he did bite me at a fair frequency.”

She looked surprised by the change in his manner, which he took some small pleasure in. Anything for a distraction, really. His skin was on fire and he'd realized by now the strange sinus feeling was an indication that he might start crying.

He rose to his feet and moved towards the bathroom. She was right that he needed to take a shower. He needed to wash the sex off his skin before whatever the hell was about to happen happened.

He spoke without turning around, just before slamming the bathroom door, “Don’t let Felix come in. The door doesn’t lock.”

 

Sebastiana lay on her stomach, the concrete roof beneath her was a familiar comfort, like a heat rock to a lizard. She aligned her scope with the building across the street, moved steadily, barely movements really, tilts, adjustments.

She found the correct window. A flat he’d been renting secretly, somewhere he wouldn’t be found until it was far too late. She could see them moving in there. She had the shot. A painfully easy shot. The prostitute just had to leave first. No reason to hurt her. She watched the woman take the money, count the money, walk to the door.

The door closed behind her and Sebastiana started counting down in her head, giving the woman enough time to come back if she’d forgotten something, enough time to leave the floor entirely if she hadn’t.

Her countdown reached zero and she squeezed the trigger. A silent shot across the street. The sound of the window cracking was louder than the bullet leaving the gun. She held her breath. Nothing changed, no one glanced up. She double-checked to be sure, but she already knew it was a perfect headshot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that flashback took fucking forever to figure out and I hope I did an okay job with it. It was the only way I could get Sherlock out of bed.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right, so I edited the scene after the flashback in the previous chapter, quite a lot I think. It was bugging me. That entire chapter was just a nightmare for some reason. Anyway, if you've already read that one you might want to check out the changes. Or not. Do you.
> 
> Edit: God, I've edited this one too now. I'm having so much trouble with Sherlock, I really apologize.

Sebastiana was smoking in the bed Irene used for clients. Their session was technically over, but she always stayed until Irene asked specifically for her to leave. Today, Irene felt disinclined to do so.

Sebastiana was still naked; her legs were crossed at the ankles, her back was against the headboard. She was toned, muscular. Most of her top half was covered in either tattoos or bruises, parts of her bottom half too; somehow she carried it all off with the haughty elegance of a 1950’s film star.

As Irene fixed her face at the bedroom vanity, she watched the woman with curiosity. 

All she’d managed to figure out so far was the smoking — how she was doing it with barely a single movement. The graceful tilt of that cigarette between her lips on the inhale, then the rare and brief appearance of smoke, ejected on a single breath. She'd go through several of those before employing her hands at all. 

It wasn’t just her stillness, she reflected. It was something in her soul. Whip her, order her around, she’d bend, she’d cry out, she’d obey, but emotionally it would be as if nothing made an impact. She’d stay calm as a house cat. There was apparently no shame in her, no self-doubt, none of the myriad other qualities that sent clients into existential bouts self-reflection, identity deconstruction, ecstatic self-hatred when the pain of a riding crop got them off.

Sebastiana finally moved an arm, removed the cigarette from her teeth. Ash was falling on her duvet and she couldn’t even convince herself to care. She was thinking the soldier looked quite ravishing with her muscles lined by tattoos, by bruises. It made a heavenly tableau. It suited her. Like stripes on a tiger.

Then the beautiful creature spoke.

“Do you think you have anger issues?” Sebastiana asked.

Irene turned to look at her directly. It had been days since she’d heard the woman speak any recognizable words, after all, and though perhaps she should’ve been offended by the question, she wasn’t. She was meeting Irene’s gaze with the gentle eyes of a doe, and her tone had been so detached. There was nothing pointed in it — it was pure curiosity.

“Do you think _you_ have anger issues, my dear?” she returned.

Sebastiana shook her head, utterly unbothered by the questioning non-response. Unbothered by perhaps anything.

“No. It’s not anger issues when you just murder people but aren’t very angry about it. I’ve asked.” The cigarette went back between her teeth.

Irene gave her a quizzical look. Perhaps the woman had noticed more than she let on, about Irene’s various dealings, about her de facto status as vague caregiver to a suicidal psychopath; perhaps she’d just noticed Irene’s bodyguards were overly well-trained, overly-numerous, and not entirely decent citizens, but she’d at least noticed something to be bringing up murder like this, with such a casual air.

“Is it murder now, to kill people in military combat?” she asked.

Sebastiana shrugged, evidently caring not a thing for semantic arguments. She rose, walked lazily over to Irene, and stamped the cigarette out in an ash tray on her vanity.

She paused like that, staring down at Irene’s neck, something very soft in her eyes.

She spoke in a quiet voice. “If you need something like that. Ever. I’ll do it for you. I don’t care.” 

She waved a vague hand in front of her own heart — where her skin was tattooed with a solid black circle, à la Kandinsky or Malevich. Whether the gesture was meant to convey an emotion or a general lack of all emotions wasn’t precisely clear.

Then, holding Irene's gaze, the softness in her eyes turned, briefly, became feral for half a second’s time. If she’d blinked she would’ve missed it. 

Irene could picture it then, precisely, how a gentle creature could do untold violence. How one could kill — not out of anger at all. 

“Return to your place, my dear,” Irene ordered. “Before I’m forced to get my whip.”

 

Sherlock was in the backseat of a cramped, white Vauxhall Corsa. The wires torn from under the dash had only been marginally put back in place. It wasn’t at all like Irene to be so untidy, or to choose something so unluxurious for transport. He could only assume her options had been severely limited, that time constraints had made it equally impossible to do anything but resort to crude tactics.

Irene wasn’t in the car - she was outside, looking at him occasionally, but mostly not, while he sat motionless with his head against the glass. His body was thrumming with energy, no valve for release; only the fact that his mind was vaguely adrift made any of it manageable. And he wasn’t sure how much longer that would last.

He tugged nervously on the sleeve of his coat, finding the fabric strangely itchy against his bare arms. He was wearing a novelty T-shirt underneath. It was fitted, was somewhat looser than intended against his frame. It belonged to Felix. 

The shower had made him feel marginally more stable. At first.

The heat of the water against his body, Felix’s smell washed off by some kind of coconut soap. The rising need to take care of some sudden, remaining urges, and the blessed relief in finding it easy to sate those urges.

This was all because he’d seen Jim again. He’d been fine, but for seeing Jim again.

So it wasn’t that surprising, really, that all he had to do was think about the first time with Jim to pull himself to completion.

Venice. His hands bracing their combined weight against the wall, his own shirt half open and bunched up under his arms, his trousers open at the front, Jim’s hands somehow moving inside his pants and inside his shirt, while he rocked solidly against him from behind.

And when he finally pushed in, some time later, the initial shock of being opened, feeling how hard Jim was inside him. The instinct to clamp down just making it feel  _more - bigger -harder_ , making them both groan.

Jim sounding like he could hardly breathe, and that pet name he’d used just that once but never again. “It’s alright, baby, it only hurts for a second.” All the same, he’d waited a full ten before pushing all the way in.

After the shower, and after a good five minutes of shame after the shower — Jim’s phantom teeth on his shoulder again, disappointment in his eyes because he was so irredeemably off the wagon now, hadn’t been so off the wagon in maybe a decade and hadn’t felt his skin crawling like this since his teenage years — he’d found Felix and Irene seated around a massive kitchen countertop. They were having tea and chatting calmly about some book Felix had not read. The book was between them — detective stories by Dorothy Sayers, which Irene had evidently taken from one of the shelves. The bag of cocaine had been lain atop it.

Sherlock’s eyes lit up at the sight of the cocaine. Felix’s eyes lit up at the sight of Sherlock.

“Hey, babe, are you feeling better?” Felix’s face was a bit too slack, too preoccupied looking at Sherlock’s chest — naked and a bit damp, just a towel around his waist — to make the sentence a question. He was on his feet. “I’ve just been chatting with your friend Irene, and I’m completely charmed of course.”

The Jim in Sherlock’s head — the hallucination that had evidently followed him from the bathroom this time — shifted his weight, just slightly, in just such a way. It made the lightest sound, the briefest exhale of pressure from his left sole to his right, a mere whisper of fabric. Somehow it was audibly a threat.

Felix walked closer, confidence absolutely coursing through him while lust made him slower and stupider than usual.

Sherlock looked to Irene and she flashed him a quick, shallow smile. 

“Though as I was telling him, if he knew anything at all about your friends, he’d be running the other direction,” she said.

It was a terrifying thought, Felix meeting his friends, yet Sherlock couldn’t help but smile at it. Irene was undeniably right.

All swagger, self-assured grin, strong handshake and true grasp of nothing, all while obviously supplying him with cocaine. The man would come away with at least a broken arm, and that was just from John. Mycroft would lock him up on a drugs charge, probably, frame him for worse, possibly, just to be an overprotective prat. And Jim.

Jim would smile right back, be even more charming, all the while looking for an opening to push him down a flight of stairs. 

In fact the Jim in his head was smiling now. A sinister, furious smile. Then his voice.

_ Oh go on, Sherlock. I bet you could make this worse if you really applied yourself. _

At a slight delay Sherlock chuckled. He felt delirious. He felt sick. He could feel Jim’s breath on his neck. 

Felix was suddenly right in front of him, giving him a questioning look.

Sherlock dropped the smile and spoke seriously, “Um, she’s joking. Is that my cocaine?”

Felix just nodded while Irene answered verbally. “Yes, and, darling, we don’t have time so you’ll just have to snort it like a person.”

“Oh, you’re going?” Felix asked. He looked crestfallen, turned briefly to encompasses Irene in the question. Polite. When Jim was polite it was always just a game. 

“Shall I say a proper goodbye then?” Felix flashed that self-assured grin, touched Sherlock’s jaw to move his face just so. Less polite. Sherlock squinted a silent judgment at him.

A second later Felix’s tongue was in his mouth, which Sherlock felt certain was actually rude, not just impolite, given Irene was still in the room.

Behind him, Jim tutting and shifting again; Sherlock kissing Felix back in an attempt to make his skin stop crawling and because frankly, he had the cocaine.

Jim shifted again, watched closely. It was like kissing a negative image — kissing him and feeling for what wasn’t there. Listening for the reactions of a ghost. The mere thought that Jim might have any feelings about what he was doing, even just rage.

Whatever emotion this was, it made his ribs ache. 

Eventually he had to grab the towel to keep his modesty intact, such as it ever was, and when they broke apart Irene was calmly flipping through a magazine, wearing the exact expression Jim employed to pretend he was scandalized.

 

He had snorted the cocaine in the end. The consequence of which was that he felt jittery, that the euphoria had come on a little too fast and that, soon now, equally too fast, he’d stop feeling pleasantly hot and sensitive and halfway humanistic.

He watched Irene through the car window. Her lips weren’t moving as she stood with the mobile to her ear. She had one hand out, fingers splayed against the exterior of Felix’s building. Her stance was irritated beyond what she usually gave away and the frustration was practically vibrating off of her. James wasn’t answering once again and she was refusing to catch on.

With a sigh, he tried to clarify the sequence of events that led to his discovery. Mycroft and John losing their minds for several hours in the morning, which, to an extent could be said of most mornings. Eventually, somehow — he still wasn’t sure how — they’d come to the conclusion that James kidnapped him. The timeframe here could be traced pretty exactly by a marked change in John’s texts.

_ Listen, Sherlock, if he’s hurting you, I’m really sorry about calling you a heartless slag. JW _

That one in particular he kept thinking about. The ‘if’ clause was a bit flummoxing.

Irene cursed at her phone, visibly gave up on James. For a moment, she closed her eyes; a vein in her forehead twitched. Then with the air of someone who was now going to pretend everything burning around her was perfectly fine, she shook herself, gave Sherlock a brief smile through the window and folded her long limbs into the driver’s seat.

“His phone must be dead,” she said lightly and Sherlock smiled. They were both definitely aware this was not the case. A moment later, Felix appeared at the door of the café across the street, juggling two coffees and what looked like another scone.

Just at the sight of him Sherlock groaned and sank a bit deeper into his seat. At least if he was eating, the attempts to kiss him publicly might stop.

“Just so we’re clear on your process, Sherlock, you’re trying to kill this man now?” Irene asked. If it mattered to her in the slightest, she'd neglected to tell her voice.

Having anticipated the question, Sherlock answered, “He’s dead anyway, at least with us he’s bait.” He started smiling tightly at Felix and waving him towards the car. “Or if you choose to believe Moriarty, he  _won’t_ kill him because _he doesn’t care what I do_.”

“So… we’re calling the bluff of a mass murderer in the throws of an emotional crisis… because we’re intellectuals?” she asked. The words were spoken brightly; they were both watching Felix cross the street. A second later, her tone became a warning. "Darling, he’s going to slow us down.”

“Trust me. I’ll have Jim talking within the hour.” He said it with certainty. He wasn't certain.

 Irene’s fingers ran over her brow, presumably trying to calm the throbbing vein. “Are you aware that you call him three different things based entirely on your mood?” she asked in a tired voice, a voice too tired to take the conversation further than a throwaway question. She’d only asked because Felix was nearly there.

And Sherlock had heard it too — his own far-too-abrupt switch between the distancing ‘Moriarty’ and the too-intimate ‘Jim.’

‘Moriarty’ was a nightmare, a fairytale villain, something formless and spectral, terrifying but in its own way contained; whereas ‘Jim’ scraped right against his skin like a straight razor, felt too close, was practically inside him.

He sighed as a shiver ran through him.

“Yes,” he admitted, right before Felix joined them.

 

Sebastiana was about to move on to the third target, midday. She’d been making excellent time thanks to some rather amazing luck on the second one. 

_Memorize their schedules, kill them indoors if at all possible, no witnesses, ideally no one should realize they’re dead for hours._

And the second one — the man had been scheduled to finish a conference call at 1, then he conceivably could’ve gone anywhere. 

Earbuds in, music blaring, Sebastiana had followed him from his office, hoped he wouldn’t stay in public too long, hoped he didn’t force her hand. Tactile, up-close contact was distasteful to her anyway, even forgetting the logistics. She hoped she wouldn’t have to drag him behind some sparse trees, that she wouldn’t be forced to search around for a place to hide the body. So many signals, so much stimuli, so much noise. And the goddamn sunlight, always so intrusive even behind shades.

But this second one had just gone directly to his flat. His empty, penthouse flat. She’d set up across the street, waited to make sure no one else was inside, waited for any indication he was meeting someone who hadn’t been on his schedule. Nothing. He was in there alone.

He turned on the telly. He opened the window shades in the main room as if inviting her scope to take a look. He stood exactly in the right place, staring out the window, like he was waiting for her bullet.

Headshot, again, and way too far above ground for anyone to hear or notice.

Afterwards, she muttered, “Creepy,” to herself while packing up her things. The sounds of the city still blocked out, she looked around to see it was beginning to sink into fog. Sharp angles of buildings appearing like jagged weapons from ethereal nothing, a city being generally invasive, being judgmental, now half smothered, and she felt unnerved. Not by the killing but by the ongoing luck.

Her mother always told her anyone who relied on luck was a self-destructive fool. She’d also warned her to beware good luck, told her the universe always evened things out eventually.

A moment later, Jim Moriarty called. 

She silenced the song on her mobile, removed one earbud to answer.

“Sir?”

“Everything going alright?” Jim greeted. He sounded congenial, though she knew he could sound that way without feeling it.

“Two down.”

“Well done you.” 

He sounded patronizing, as if he’d already known, and as if he was preoccupied with something far more important anyway. She imagined he probably was. She could hear him typing. 

“But please don’t get cocky, alright? I lose more people that way. Pride before the fall, etcetera.” He paused for a moment. She could hear him swallow thickly. When he spoke again his voice had changed, had switched to a lower register and gone specifically hollow. “Won’t do at all to make mistakes today.”

She thought: _I don’t make mistakes. The unstructured universe makes mistakes._

She said nothing.

“So. I hacked your phone,” he went on. He sounded like he was eating something between sentences now. “Which leads me to my main question. Have you really been listening to Crazy In Love on repeat while you kill people?”

The question, posed with undisguised amusement, caught her by surprise. Still, she felt no embarrassment, if that’s what she was meant to feel.

“Uh huh,” she said.

“Hmm. I once listened to Linger by the Cranberries on a loop for over seven hours. Would’ve gone on a lot longer but Irene smashed my speakers with a cricket bat.”

She remembered Irene kept a cricket bat at the Belgravia house.

After eating for a while longer — it sounded like cereal — he went on.

“Anyway, while I have you — just so all our cards are out, you’re in love with Irene, right?”

She stayed silent again. She wasn’t embarrassed. At all. But it was none of his business.

“Oh you have to answer me, Sebastiana. You can choose to lie to me, but you really do have to answer.”

She got the sense he was collecting pieces on a chess board and learning their precise movements.

“Yes,” she said. With the rifle bag over her shoulder, she started walking for the stairs.

She could hear the answering smile in his voice. “Mmhmm. Choosing to lie would’ve made things rather awkward.”

She didn’t think he was trying to scare her. If she’d believed at any point that he would harm Irene, she never would’ve agreed to work for him. He was just trying to even the scales. He’d as much as told her his feelings for the tall, curly-haired man, the one he’d evidently been wallowing in misery over in one of Irene’s many bedrooms. 

“She said I should assume you already know everything."

Jim chuckled at that. He sounded quite pleased with himself really. 

“Well that was sweet of her,” he answered. “But I do think most people would’ve got there at Beyoncé, if I’m being really honest with myself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey if you're still reading - good job and thank you! This is so damn long!  
> Next chapter is for sure Moriarty. And again, comments are always welcome.


	12. Chapter 12

Jim had four laptops open on his aunt’s coffee table, which had been otherwise cleared of trash and knickknacks. All but one showed live surveillance feeds of various locations around London. 

The one nearest him had multiple windows open, showing forums, administrator backchannels. A few prompts sat open beneath the blinking command line, waiting for an initiation sequence to be entered.

Jim was leaned forward in the center of the couch. He was completely still with his face in his hands. A black cat purred happily against his knee.

 

Killing Carl Powers had been easy, when you got right down to it.

He’d been a bully. A relentless one. And something about Jim had bothered him. Probably the same thing that bothered most people — the way he moved a little slowly, spoke a little softly, seemed to never pay complete attention and then seemed to know everything about everyone.

His father kept telling him to just fight back, to punch him back, to stop being a sissy. And though the invective hadn’t fallen entirely on deaf ears, he still knew, realistically, that he was too small and too weak to do it that way. 

But with James Moriarty Sr. there was never a plan, just a violent impulse; it was his fatal flaw. It was why he’d risen to the towering heights of part-time construction worker, full-time low-level criminal and why he’d burnt all bridges that could’ve gotten him anywhere else. 

But Jim could think. Jim watched Carl closely between beatings. He’d noticed the eczema cream, and more importantly he knew where the library was. An hour there and he’d decided on botulinum toxin.

It was lucky Carl was a swimmer. Lucky about that London swim meet, too.

Unlucky about the trainers, really, and the panic impulse to take them, for which he probably had his DNA to thank, but then there was always an element of chaos to any plan.

And somewhere between good and bad luck was that scrawny, posh little thing wandering around bothering the police. Some dark star of misfortune, some great star of hope. Whichever he was, Jim could still see him tugging on sleeves, getting sneered at. Right before his eyes he was becoming something.

After taking a life, he’d waited to feel remorse, he’d expected to feel remorse, but he’d only felt freedom. Freedom and fascination.

He’d started putting on faces after that, stopped walking around with all his miseries and eccentricities on full display. He didn’t owe truth to anyone and he saw that clearly now. The only thing that mattered was his own personal truth, his own awareness, the execution of his own designs.

It wasn’t long before he started running jobs for James Sr.’s criminal employers, realized he was good at it, _made_ for it even. It was small stuff at first, errands his father was too drunk to remember he’d been assigned. He charmed the bosses easily. 

And then one of them liked him in a _very_ different way from the others; he’d been just 13 at the time. For keeping that secret, for not making a fuss about it, he’d immediately been given more responsibility — weapons shipments, drug trafficking, eventually bombings, killings, etcetera etcetera. 

If they’d been trying to kill him, which even at the time he very strongly suspected, they really should’ve tried harder. As it was, it all just served to make him stronger. 

With time, death became a friend, he learned its many faces, learned it was almost _almost_ random. The slight vagaries were the best bit, the little spindly bits around the edges, the parts you could harness and play with if you were clever. It was why he waited to do it with his bare hands in the end: the subtle perfection of an appropriate death. Overpowered and beaten to death by his sissy of a son. Dear old dad certainly hadn't enjoyed going out like that.

 

After he’d hung up on Irene, sent Sherlock that string of texts, there was still some lag time, some waiting for Sebastiana to get to London.

Usually he could stand to be alone with his thoughts. Usually the sound of the clock ticking wouldn’t make him long for a fuse to be lit. Usually his mind bouncing around a dull room could find its amusements somewhere, in the construction of a strategy, a list of objects he might reasonably employ to kill someone stronger than him, in the masochistic fascination with every inch of his own bodily pain. Usually he had better control of himself. But today he had just the one agony, hitting him relentlessly over the head.

So he’d finished his plan from the night previous. Pictures of himself as a child. A metal barrel. Lighter fluid. A match. Easy peasy.

He’d left the bonfire burning in the driveway, and then one of the damn cats followed him back inside. It started purring and nuzzling against him on the couch. It followed him when his resistance broke and he got up to steal one of his aunt’s cigarettes from the kitchen cabinet. 

She was already in there, already making dinner in the early afternoon. Possibly an inability to sit still ran in the family.

“Those cigarette are there for my gentleman friends,” Aoife reprimanded, as he took a few from the box and started smoking anyway. “It’s a terrible habit,” she added.

He didn’t answer, just stared at her, tried not to extrapolate a count of “gentleman friends” based on the newness of the cigarettes and the amount missing, which was ‘very new’ and ‘seven.’ She was making something with a crockpot that evidently involved peeling a lot of potatoes. 

He realized with a shudder that she was the most interesting thing currently happening in the house, and that if he wanted to stop picturing Sherlock getting fucked by a stranger while out of his mind on cocaine, he’d probably have to start talking to her. 

“About Jesus,” he started, because his eyes were on the wall, where several crucifixes were hanging near the pots and pans. “You know… when he’s all bound and naked on the cross like that,” he gestured with the cigarette, though she didn’t look. “He’s quite fit. Hot. I definitely would — how about you?” 

He sucked down a long cloud of smoke without blinking, watched her twitch violently. 

A large chunk of potato fell down the drain. 

“Oh no, was that wrong of me?” he asked.

“Of course it was.” She seemed nearly faint at the thought. “It’s not right for a man to say—”

He smirked a bit, then furrowed his brow in mock confusion. “Then… would it be alright for a woman to say it? That she might be into some light bondage with Our Lord and Savior?”

She shuddered but remained silent this time. She’d evidently realized every answer just made him say something worse. It had taken her long enough.

When the cat jumped on his shoulder a moment later, she actually screamed and crossed herself.

“Black cats are… emissaries of satan,” she whispered, straight-faced, somehow without a hint of irony clouding her voice. She didn’t like to see herself as a caricature. That was a mistake, in his opinion. Being a caricature was freeing, it was like being invisible.

“That explains it then,” he muttered in response. He watched her struggle to regain composure. Eventually the cat jumped away, ran back to the living room, to start chewing the edges of things, causing general chaos.

He continued to stand there, to watch her become increasingly bad at peeling potatoes.

He hadn’t been joking about Jesus looking sexy in bondage. It was sort of why he’d been an altar boy for so many years. 

He started talking again. “I’ve tried it with some of my gentlemen friends, you know. Tying them up when we fuck.” 

She cut a potato in half and just left the fallen part in the sink. He watched with no reaction. “But this one particular man, not a gentleman by any stretch I’m afraid — he’d never let me do it. It was always, ‘You’ve tried to murder me, James. I’m not letting you put me in restraints.’ As if I’d need restraints to kill him when he was sleeping in my bed every night.” 

He could picture Sherlock’s face when he’d made that argument. His eyes widening, then abruptly narrowing, all while slightly pulling away. Shocked and unamused. And a little bit betrayed. Like Jim was poking holes in a fiction they were meant to be keeping up together. 

“I mean, what, did he think I was an idiot?” he muttered, suddenly feeling very bitter about the entire thing.

Aoife Moriarty had stopped peeling and was just staring blankly at the sink, seemed to be muttering a prayer. He stared blankly along with her, not muttering a prayer, just annoyed with himself. It was one of the many curses of thinking too much, that any avenue had the potential to lead back to a sore point.

“Ugh, I have to go find something better to do,” he eventually grumbled. 

Then he wandered off to hack into Sebastiana’s phone. That took about five minutes. Then it was back to the mindless tedium, just waiting for Sebastiana to kill people, getting everything even more in order for the moment she finished. It was an extremely brief bright patch to realize she was listening to the same Beyoncé song on repeat, but then he was just waiting again.

He knew where Sherlock was. That was maybe the worst of it. Irene had used his web to track down the mobile signal — that’s how she’d found him. So he knew exactly where he was. And he was just sitting on his hands about it. Sitting and thinking. It was awful, agonizing. He needed a distraction. 

He could see from Sebastiana’s phone that she’d been stationary across the street from her target for several minutes. He called her, vaguely teased her about the obvious thing with Irene.

That killed a few minutes.

Then he paced around the house for a while, created a scavenger hunt for himself, found seven different bibles in one room. He was just paging through one, eyes bulging in mild amusement at one of the more gruesome punishments, when his resolve suddenly crumbled to nothing. 

“Oh who am I kidding,” he muttered to himself. He let the book fall closed, then let it drop to the floor with the others.

He returned to the couch; he opened a second and third laptop, connected wires, accessed the grid and his backchannel into the London CCTV. 

On one laptop, an access portal to the CCTV server, waiting for coordinates; on the second, an aerial map of the city, showing the realtime location of Sherlock’s phone.

From the speed Sherlock’s little blue dot was moving, the road he was moving on (no reason there would be traffic there), he had to assume they were walking. Slowly. Which was more than a little bit strange. Sherlock never walked slowly and given Irene’s level of panic when they last spoke, she definitely would’ve tried to find a car.

When he entered their location, found the correct CCTV streams, opened them, he saw instantly why they were walking so slowly. To send a message without a picture. Because the entire street, probably much of London, was covered in a dense fog. 

The message: that Sherlock wanted his attention. The secondary message: that the man from last night was probably still with them, because Sherlock would be using any means necessary to get his attention.

“You are playing with so much fire, Sherlock Holmes,” Jim muttered to himself as he watched the digital pin continue its slow progression. 

It was always so hard not to give Sherlock exactly what he wanted.

 

When Jim first told Sherlock he loved him, they were in a hotel suite in Estonia.

Almost right after they got there, after the two-man security detail left to set up in the next room, after Sherlock grumbled about knowing Jim had slept with both of them, after Jim asked if he was jealous and backed him against the nearest wall, after Sherlock got on his knees, opened Jim’s trousers and started sucking him off, those gorgeous curls running between Jim’s fingers. 

Sherlock’s eyes on him, his mouth on him, his lips around his cock, his tongue sliding as he rocked his head forward and back. 

It was almost reverent the way he did it — sliding his wet mouth on Jim’s cock while looking up at him.

Jim groaned and rolled his hips, one hand on the wall, one tightening in Sherlock’s hair as he pushed the head of his cock into the tight heat of Sherlock’s throat. It made Sherlock’s eyes water, made him gag slightly, and in the aftermath his eyes fluttered shut. 

“ _Look at me_ ,” Jim ordered sharply, clenching a fist in Sherlock’s hair and pulling hard.

Sherlock’s eyes blinked open; his pupils were still blown wide, he was still carefully breathing through his nose, but now the look in his eyes had changed — now he was definitely furious.

Jim watched the clock tick down from there, with a pretty good idea what was coming, enough to keep a tight hold on Sherlock’s hair, to keep him contained by that hold even when he finally pulled back and off and glared up at him.

“ _What if I were to stop right now, James_?” he asked sharply. 

The haughty fury of his voice was somewhat diminished by his complete and utter dishevelment. His lips were swollen, his cheeks were a rather indecent shade of pink, his chest was rising and falling rapidly because he’d barely been able to breathe moments ago.

The visual made Jim feel a million things, all at once, nearly to the point of inducing motion-sickness. He tightened his grip until Sherlock winced. 

“It’s impossible to do _that_ while looking at you the entire time,” Sherlock snapped. He pulled to the side, annoyed as Jim started stroking his lips with his thumb.

“Well that’s not true, you’ve done it before,” he said, his tone hollow. Every muscle was tensing for the heat of Sherlock’s mouth back.

“What if I were to stop?” Sherlock repeated, his eyes going to Jim’s erection as he tried to pull away again, and it took Jim until precisely then to realize what Sherlock was really upset about. 

He released him at once. He rolled his eyes briefly to the ceiling, his breath coming in jagged gasps, struggling to even out.

“At least ask what you’re really asking,” he said. His eyes returned to Sherlock’s face, to track every slight change, every flinch and hesitation.

Sherlock’s eyes were on his own hands, which were clenched into fists and then pointlessly adjusting his sleeves. “If you know what I’m really asking, why do I have to ask it?” he muttered.

Jim smiled, somehow fondly, at how fucking posh Sherlock was, how desperate he was to maintain the illusion of control, and his ribs started to ache, and then something inside him broke. 

“Honey, you spent this whole time thinking I’d actually _do that_?” he finally asked. There was an edge of pain running through the irritation in his voice. It actually hurt so much he needed to move. Immediately. He tucked himself back in his trousers, turned and paced away, leaving Sherlock on his knees. 

He went to the liquor cabinet and pulled out a few small bottles of wine. Sherlock didn’t really drink hard liquor. 

Jim focused on the tactile sensations, the details, the map of Tuscany on the bottles, the precise yellow hue of the wine, to calm himself down. He set them on a central countertop nearby. It wasn’t made of marble but was made to look like marble. On the opposite side of the counter, a seating area, blue leather chairs in a modern style, windows overlooking the bay. Always water. It was always water.

He returned his eyes to Sherlock; he was still on his knees in the corner, watching him, seeming very lost, like he wasn’t entirely sure who he was looking at.

“It’s not as if you’re known for your restraint,” Sherlock said, defensively. 

Then he stood up a little too quickly. He must’ve noticed Jim noticing that, that it was fear propelling him, and he must’ve noticed the total lack of answering momentum in Jim as he just stood there slack by the bar, staring back, unreadably mild, then glancing away again to pull two glasses from the cabinet. 

Sherlock was by his side in seconds.

Jim poured the first glass, slid it the short distance to Sherlock’s hand. 

“It’s been a long day,” Sherlock said, his voice a little uncertain, fumbling with a cliché he didn’t habitually use. 

Jim nodded in acknowledgement, then drained half of his own glass in one swallow. It was an out. An end to a conversation, to an awkward situation. It could’ve stopped there but for some reason it didn’t. He could feel Sherlock’s eyes, darting glances at him every few seconds, obviously feeling like he’d done something wrong, when honestly he hadn’t. He hadn’t done anything wrong.

“I’m… sorry," Jim said. "Sherlock, _I’m sorry_." The words came out frantically, colored by the manic agony in his head, at the thought of Sherlock being afraid of him in that way.

When he glanced over; Sherlock was already searching his face again. He had a certain look in his eyes— one Jim had definitely seen before. Like there might be something slightly redeeming inside him, somewhere deep, somewhere extremely, extremely buried.

“God, don’t,” Jim whined. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s beneath you.”

“No, you’re _sorry_ —Sorry for what exactly?” Sherlock asked. The fascination was vivid in his voice, but there was something halting there, too.

_Reichenbach_ was the unspoken word between them. 

Jim gave him a blank stare before saying, hollowly, “Not for _that_ , honey.”

Sherlock stayed silent for a few seconds; silent and completely still. Then he grabbed Jim’s hand, surged closer and stared directly into his eyes.

“ _You are lying to me._ ”

Jim didn’t fight back against the crushing grip on his hand but his face flashed a brief warning, that he would fight back if he was pushed far enough.He held Sherlock’s gaze from mere centimeters apart; he let a mask of blankness drop over his face, one he knew Sherlock couldn’t interpret.

“I’m sorry you thought I would violate you, Sherlock,” he said, his voice almost as blank as his eyes.

Sherlock released him. After blinking, momentarily recoiling from the statement, he started scrambling for purchase again.

“Why on Earth would you feel sorry about that?” Sherlock asked. Jim waited, sent him a sidelong glance, then began tidying the counter a bit, because Sherlock was obviously about to start having a conversation with himself. 

“You seem to spend every waking—” Sherlock broke off, then moved involuntarily closer. When he spoke again, it was more quietly, like they were sharing a secret. “You take credit for _any_ unexplained crime or massacre you happen to hear about, sometimes crimes that were simultaneous and on different continents; the number of times you’ve threatened to turn people into shoes when you would never, ever do such a thing let alone _wear_ such a thing and I’ve heard you brag about eating people when in reality you’re practically a vegetarian. You _love it_ when people think you’re worse than you are, Jim.” 

Sherlock stopped abruptly, breathing heavily again, trying his best but failing to look composed. A smile flashed over Jim’s face as he watched the renewed flush of color play over Sherlock’s features. He hadn’t meant to call him ‘Jim.’

He watched Sherlock’s lips for a few seconds, then let his eyes flick back up.

“Assuming that’s a question you actually wanted an answer to, dear, which,” Jim started, then paused to make a face communicating extreme doubt.

“Shut up, James,” Sherlock breathed.

“It’s because I love you,” Jim finished. He stroked the stem of his wine glass, then swallowed the remainder in a single go.

When he glanced back over, Sherlock’s eyes were almost comically wide. He seemed to be struggling for words and struggling to keep himself quiet all at the same time.

It was hard not to pity him, really. It was often hard not to pity him. Being forced to process such a thing, when the task of processing any love was already a little bit beyond him. 

“Jesus, Sherlock,” Jim muttered. “Come here.” He pulled Sherlock forward by the hand, started kissing him almost entirely to comfort him.

 

He closed the twin laptops and switched to another computer: a smaller, more personal, far more secure one. This one took a moment to boot up; it took several decryptions to access the programs he needed, but then there it was like turning on a light: Baker Street. All four cameras still operational. One in John’s room, one in Sherlock’s room; the former of which he hoped to God he’d never have to use, the latter of which he at least knew intellectually he should feel shame about. 

Then the main two, providing two different angles of the living room: one on the mantle facing the chairs, the desk, the couch Sherlock got high on, took fretful midday naps on; one angled to see the kitchen.

Sure enough, John was in there, pacing and bouncing a small child against his shoulder. 

Going by the arrangement of the chairs, Mycroft had been there and gone again. Going by John’s demeanor, Sherlock had yet to arrive.

“Aoife, bring me a drink and I won’t burn this house down,” Jim said. He’d spoken it just loud enough for her to hear from the kitchen, his eyes not leaving the screen even for a second.

His aunt had been avoiding the living room since he’d taken up residence there, had been avoiding him as much as possible. She came into the room just long enough to gasp at the pile of bibles on the floor, then disappear back to the kitchen.

When she returned with a bottle of whiskey and a glass, he briefly glanced away from John, who was still moving in circles to lull a child to sleep. He smiled up at her with all the sweetness of a choirboy. 

“Thank you, Aunt Aoife,” he said. She shuddered at the change in him and crossed herself before returning to the kitchen. 

He poured a drink, sniffed it, then shouted after her. “If there's arsenic in this, you’re only making me stronger!”

John had turned, was looking towards the door, could obviously hear someone ascending. Jim switched the angle so he could see more of the doorway, then shrugged at the drink, took a long swallow and set the glass down.

Irene entered. She gave John a long-suffering look from the entryway. Even with his back turned, without audio, it was clear John was asking about Sherlock.

The man and Sherlock arrived a moment later, and Irene moved across the room to Sherlock’s chair. She had her phone out. She was texting someone. Not him though. Sebastiana probably, possibly Molly, improbably Mycroft.

He cursed himself for not enabling audio when he had the chance, for convincing himself it was too invasive. The body language between John and Sherlock and this new arsehole — he would’ve paid good money to have it with subtitles. One second it looked like John was about to hit someone. The next second, the man, whatever his name was, was standing between Sherlock and John, his hand defensively on Sherlock’s chest. Then for a brief second it looked like Sherlock was yelling at John. Whatever he said, it woke the child and made John leave the room.

Irene got up to make tea after that, and exchanged a brief glance with Sherlock as she went. 

In her wake, Sherlock pulled the man towards the bedroom. They disappeared inside and shut the door behind them. 

Jim moved so quickly to enlarge the bedroom camera he nearly knocked over his drink.

He’d placed that camera so it directly faced the bed; which was why, in a rather extreme example of poetic justice, he was now able to see them both so clearly.

Sherlock was standing there at the foot of the bed, letting the other man kiss the back of his neck, run his hands up under his shirt, grope him through his trousers; meanwhile he was doing all those little squirming things he did whenever Jim touched him: getting so jumpy and sensitive, from a combination of mild discomfort at being touched at all and an absolute, frantic need to be touched more. Then the other man was pulling Sherlock’s shirt over his head. The way that man was touching him, the speed at which he was moving… It was obvious where it was all heading, and quickly.

Then Sherlock paused everything to pull a mobile from his pocket.

Jim already had the phone in his hand. It felt like it took forever for the text to arrive.

 

_Call Irene right now if you want this to stop. SH_

 

It wasn’t even a question. He dialed immediately, watched the man get Sherlock onto the bed, watched him climb on top of him.

“Well, hello, Jim,” Irene answered cheerily. He didn’t speak. In the background of the call, he heard her knock three times on a door. Sherlock’s room no doubt. 

“How are things?” she asked.

Jim wasn’t listening. His full attention was on Sherlock and the man on top of him. After the three knocks, blessedly, Sherlock started extricating himself.

Then he was facing away from the man on the bed, facing the camera while pulling the T-shirt back on — a drawing of a honeybee perched on a skull, the slogan ‘To Bee or Not to Bee’ written in cursive white letters on the front. Sherlock was talking to the man on the bed. He wasn’t leaving the room. For a brief moment, he looked directly at the camera.

Jim still said nothing so Irene continued.

“How far’s Sebastiana gotten — has she killed number five yet?” she asked.

“Put Sherlock on the phone,” he answered. His voice sounded wrong, even to himself. It sounded both violent and soft. It sounded like two states that weren’t supposed to meet.

“Yes, of course, but answer me first, dear.”

“Oh, Irene, how could she have killed number five already? She’s not a witch,” he whined. “She’s on three. Just text her, she’ll tell you. She’ll tell you everything. She’d probably just piss off to America and forget the whole thing if you asked her to, though that wouldn’t really help either of you, now get Sherlock!”

He wasn’t watching the feed from the living room, didn’t really care what was happening in there, but he could feel her roll her eyes, could hear her walking. There was a slight delay between the sound of the bedroom door opening and the corresponding visual. 

Irene opened the door, extended the phone to Sherlock, who seemed thoroughly unsurprised.

The man stayed on the bed, looking confused. Irene stayed in the room with him and Sherlock left. 

Jim finally expanded the living room view, watched Sherlock pace with the phone over to the couch, watched him not sit down, watched him stare out the window instead. He was stalling, both because he was still afraid of Jim, really, underneath everything, and because he was high. It was vivid in his body language that he wasn’t sure whether what he’d just done was a good idea. He turned to face the fireplace, where he knew one of the cameras was hidden; he raised the phone to his ear.

“Hello, James,” he said. As he spoke, he started raking a hand through his hair. He’d seen himself in the mirror, realized he looked disheveled. 

Jim stayed silent for a moment and just watched him preen himself, aware Sherlock was doing it for his benefit. Everything he could think of to say paled in comparison to the pleasure of that.

“Hello, Sherlock,” he said at last. His tongue felt heavy, his head felt heavy. It hadn’t been the plan to talk to him again. “Proud of yourself?”

“Not about this, no, not particularly,” he answered. The truth was clear on his face, in the lines of irritation, the shifting nervousness and embarrassment. “It did work though,” he added, pedantically. 

He looked worried one second and frantic the next. Jim could practically feel the addiction vibrating under his skin. He’d taken a hit recently, but it wasn’t helping him nearly as much as he needed it to.

When Jim didn’t speak, Sherlock added, “And now I know you were lying before, when you said you didn’t _care_.” He said this last with vitriol, bitterness. 

“Well I hope that still feels worth it when I’ve torn his throat out,” he answered.

Sherlock smiled tightly and paced around the chairs. Dressed in that idiotic T-shirt, from evidently a Shakespeare festival, his injection bruises stood out like constellations on his arm. His eyes looked red. “This destruction you’re planning — it’s what, then, a punishment? I’m being punished for leaving you? At an extreme delay?” He was rubbing at his face. He was having trouble focusing.

Jim took a breath. He just wanted to watch Sherlock pace, wanted to talk enough to keep him in the living room while Irene kept the other man away, but not enough to let Sherlock gain the advantage he was looking for. 

“No,” he said. He turned the tv on, turned down the volume. He took another long drink. If he concentrated completely on Sherlock, he might lose his mind.

“What do you mean ‘no’? Are you watching television?” Sherlock asked sharply.

“I mean ‘no’ in the usual sense, Sherlock. The opposite of yes,” Jim droned, his eyes on the telly; a breaking news story was just overtaking the chyron, under some gray-haired news man’s face. 

His eyes shifted briefly back to Sherlock, who was hesitating, evidently struggling with that dismissive answer. “Not a punishment, fine, but that card you left at the hospital. You said it was your intention to pay back a debt. Let me guess, that’s some kind of random word association again, some pun or unsolvable riddle.”

“Someone woke up angry.”

“It’s derivative, James.”

“Mm, can one be derivative of oneself? I think you mean ‘repetitive.’ It’s repetitive. Like you with the endless relapses, each time pretending you only did it for a case. Round and round and round you go.”

That visibly hurt him. He seemed to struggle getting more words out, even as they sat there on his tongue. 

“I was clean before —” he started, before his voice gave out. 

He turned and paced away from the mirror, his hand against his head. He turned back to shout, “ _I am high because of you!_ ” 

It was almost nostalgic. Sherlock’s narcissism completely unable to bear Jim thinking negatively of him, Sherlock blaming him for everything, even things he couldn’t reasonably be expected to control.

Sherlock was squinting at the camera now, hidden in the skull on the mantlepiece, waiting for comment. “Oh you don’t have anything to say to that?”

“I don’t have anything _new_ to say to that.” 

“ _You destroyed my violin_ ,” Sherlock said. He must’ve heard the pettiness in his voice, in that abrupt subject change.

Jim chuckled at him, remembered with perfect clarity the tactile pleasure of smashing that Stradivarius. At the time it was enough to slightly ease the searing pain, to take the worst of the edge off. Torture, beatings, none of it compared even slightly to the feeling of Sherlock being there and then suddenly not being there.

Sherlock continued, undeterred, anger positively rising off of him like steam from a lake. “I know I tried to take that violin with me and I know I couldn’t find it anywhere the morning I left, which means you knew I was leaving before I told you I was and you hid it from me on purpose.” 

Jim smiled tightly. He glanced up at the television, rolled his eyes around the room. At some point the cat had returned to him, was now sleeping next to him on the couch. He scratched its head; it started purring

“It also means you _let_ me steal from you,” Sherlock went on. Jim knew he wasn’t precisely a participant in this now, more a passive observer. “That notebook, the one you’d filled with ciphertext. You knew I’d take that — you knew I was trying to decipher it, you kept teasing me about it. You could’ve hidden it with the violin but you didn’t.”

When it was clear Sherlock was pausing for comment, Jim muttered, “Well that’s all very clever, darling. If you ever get sober again, you should try detective work.” He poured himself another drink but didn’t touch it.

And then the predictable response, like the chiming of a clock: “Shut up, James.”

Jim slouched back, leaned his head back, stared at the ceiling and closed his eyes. No matter how much progress he’d made in the past year, talking about Odessa still made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. And it was obvious Sherlock was probing for information, wanting to know what he knew, that he was going on the attack to keep him off-balance

When he was able to speak evenly again, he leaned forward, leaned his forehead against his palm to vaguely stop the racing thoughts. He spoke quietly, “I let you steal a book of poems you don’t understand, a tie clip I don’t care about and a notebook you can’t read. That’s hardly the case of the century, Columbo.” 

A glance up at Sherlock after throwing him that bone. Sherlock’s face was trained to stillness; he didn’t react because he was trying not to seem satisfied by the result of his gambit, but that was the tell in itself: seeming disinterested in anything Jim was saying.

“I might’ve deciphered it,” Sherlock said, irritably. 

“Might’ve, yes. But haven’t and can’t,” Jim answered. That ruffled him, hurt him even, and an idea occurred to him, a stray thought really, because he couldn’t stand it anymore, he just couldn’t. “Listen, honey, if I just told you what I’m doing would you leave me alone?”

Sherlock straightened abruptly, obviously taken aback by that. “I… No… I would try to stop you. Obviously.” He said it unevenly, greatly confused. Maybe he could hear the pain in Jim’s voice and maybe he couldn’t.

“Oh, I’m willing to allow that much, you’ll fail anyway,” Jim muttered. “Just leave me alone, send that man away, and I swear I’ll tell you my whole plan like a Bond villain.”

That recoil, the dry little swallow. “No,” he answered.

Jim didn’t blink, stared at Sherlock through the ache in his chest. He knew his next question, he knew the answer. “Why? Admit why.”

Sherlock cleared his throat. He glanced behind him to make sure the room was empty, then he spoke quickly and quietly.

“Because you’ll try to kill yourself again,” he said. 

He immediately regretted saying it. That was clear in his inability to stand still or face the camera after uttering it. 

When he recommenced talking, it was halting at first, then alive with an effort to control the fear, contain it, make it expository. 

“It’s — this. It’s — everything’s been off-book, everything’s steeped in chaos which makes everything seem like a mistake, despite being intentional.”

Jim felt Sherlock’s concern, his panic, then he felt his own desires coming on like a rushing train. He wanted to spare him; he wanted to rescue him; he wanted to give him anything and everything he wanted. 

After a pause, he did the last, played his part. 

“You think I’m pretending to make mistakes?” he asked, gently.

“No, I know you are,” Sherlock said. 

Jim could see Sherlock’s hands shaking. He chuckled and rubbed the bridge of his nose; a migraine was beginning to split his brain in half. “Keep going then. Show me how clever you are.”

Sherlock rushed ahead quickly, eager for distraction and for Jim’s approval. “Irene said you’re destroying everything. She didn’t mean London, she meant your own things. The hitmen at the brothel. It was random, how they died, but that didn’t matter because you intended for them to die at some point anyway so you just… leaned into it.”

“That’s good, very good. Go on,” he said. Another mercy, feeding Sherlock compliments, making him dance, feeling all the while like a choke collar was pulling, collapsing his airflow, dragging him behind a bus.

“And Irene’s about to run, that was obvious from the start. She’s been without backup, without support. I thought it was just because… maybe she was hiding it from you, too, but that’s not right, is it?” Sherlock asked. He was pacing restlessly around the room in that sexy T-shirt, effectively binding Jim’s wrists, making everything more difficult for him. “Because you’re the same, you’re also without backup, without support, you’re staying somewhere without your usual things, you’re using a new driver, and Irene mentioned a series of five hits being executed by that driver. That’s a skeleton crew if ever there was one — a driver who’s also working as a killer? Why don’t you have anyone else? Because you _can’t_ use anyone else, not for this. Only a very small group can be trusted with this specific task.”

Jim’s heart fluttered at the sound reasoning of it all, at the narcissistic gleam in Sherlock’s eye whenever he asked himself a leading question. He smiled through the pain overtaking his chest, the pulsing numbness in his toes and fingers. 

Then Sherlock, with a certain expectant air, pacing close to the camera again. His lips were just slightly parted, his cheeks flushed. He was waiting for Jim to be impressed, begging him for praise.

“And what task’s that?” Jim asked flatly, because everything fucking hurt and he needed to move this along.

Sherlock’s expression faltered. He’d evidently picked up on the boredom in Jim’s voice,onthe intentional lack of compliment, but he cleared his throat and went on anyway. 

“Self-destruction. More precisely, destruction of some part of your web based in London. Self-destruction’s much easier when you have outside help, harder with inside help. No one’s ever very keen to set fire to the building they’re trapped inside.” He waited a moment after finishing, his eyes moving as he listened for Jim’s voice. “James?”

It was adorable the way he looked at the camera like it might look back, how he was seeking his approval still, even as his entire face spelled fear. 

“Yes, _William_?” Jim asked, his voice not just bored now but hard, annoyed. 

“Was it right?” Sherlock bit off the words so sharply, the question mark wore away.

“Of course it’s right, you know it’s right,” Jim answered, irritably. “You just don’t understand why I’m doing any of it.”

Sherlock flinched for a moment but then met his tone exactly, chased him around the corner. “Oh, who cares about why? Probably just some cell or faction or other was getting mutinous. Do any of your dramatic plots have satisfying reasons? You’re dramatic, James. You just do things to cause trouble. Like that time you tried to steal a tree.”

Jim rubbed at the pain in his forehead, his eyes roamed to the bottle of pills on the coffee table. He glanced at the tv. “Well don’t say it like that because I _did_ steal a tree, Sherlock.”

“And I guess I just conveniently never saw it after you stole it,” Sherlock answered.

“No, it’s really not convenient at all that you — ” Jim broke off with a heavy sigh. Sherlock was smiling. He was winding him up. Trying to bring him out, getting him to play. “Anyway, honey, you might want to turn on the news,” he finished. 

When Sherlock started moving again to find the remote, it was clear from the uncertain instability of his movements that he’d gotten himself a little too excited, that he’d found the high he was looking for, that it was raging through his veins and that a cessation now would feel like hitting a wall at 150. 

He turned on the tv. Then he saw what Jim could see — an explosion in Islington. The broadcaster was saying there were at least seven dead, among them Gillian Clay and Winston Fallchurch, both long suspected to have criminal dealings and wanted in connection to a string of armed robberies. 

Sherlock put out a hand to balance himself against the mantlepiece. The names would mean quite a lot to him, of course. After a moment’s pause, he shouted for Irene. His shout brought her to the living room, but not just her. The man as well. And then John and the child.

Although Jim was really more concerned about Sherlock, he still took stock of the others. 

With no reaction whatsoever on her face, Irene politely asked John for his phone and started dialing someone. She was almost certainly checking on Sebastiana. 

And bless Irene, really, because whatever she’d said to that man in the bedroom was keeping him well away from Sherlock now, making him stand almost in the doorway as he watched the news broadcast, looking absolutely petrified. 

And John with the child in his arms, gawking at the telly like it was somehow the worst disaster he’d ever seen, then turning to Sherlock of course, because that’s who this show of outrage was really for.

Sherlock, who hadn’t moved in the slightest and was just staring at the telly, obviously on another planet with his thoughts. 

“Only one more to go, baby,” Jim said, as if he was gently nudging him to wake up. “Tell me who.”

“Sylvester Reeves,” Sherlock said absently, immediately, just a diligent student asked a question in class.

“I know you’ve been studying them, tinkering around in my web. I know you know the rest now,” he said. He probably sounded like the devil in Sherlock’s ear.

“Of course I have, of course I know. He took over operations in London after you… after…” 

Jim held his breath, waited to see if Sherlock could bring himself to say it. Evidently he couldn’t, because his eyes went to John and the child. And then the struggle on his face, about which thing to be worried about first, deciding which was the more decent thing, despite how he actually felt.

In the background John was saying, “What, Sherlock? What is it — it’s Moriarty, right? It’s him on the phone?”

“It’s. Yes,” Sherlock answered, stiffly. “Of course it’s him, it’s fine, it’s under control.”

Jim laughed derisively at that until Sherlock turned away from John and moved toward the kitchen. Then, in a whisper, Sherlock spoke to him again, “You can’t possibly be destroying it _all._ You can’t be.”

John must’ve heard that, despite Sherlock’s best efforts, because his questioning, obnoxious voice was just audible in the background. And then Sherlock returned abruptly to his bedroom. 

With a sigh, Jim enlarged the bedroom feed again, watched Sherlock become more vulnerable in the context of his own room, away from the others, just with him. 

“I’m moving shop. London’s not what it was,” he said, gently again, and cursing himself for it. He just couldn't help being gentle with him when he looked so fragile. “Too many bad memories. Too many people who know my face. Thank your sister for that, by the way.” 

“Oh shut up, James,” Sherlock snapped. His free hand was in his hair, his body language was frantic. “You miss me. Why else kidnap John? It certainly wasn’t for his sterling medical advice. And we both know why these cameras are here.”

Jim watched the line of Sherlock’s neck, remembered the way it craned back, how it felt under his lips, what it tasted like. He swallowed thickly before answering, no real fight in his voice, just hollow pettiness. “Because you left them up?”

Sherlock was physically shaking now and he lowered himself to his knees to look directly at the camera, his face filling the entire frame. “ _Please_ ,” he said.

Jim could see the junkie in his eyes, the Sherlock who couldn’t stop following him, obsessing over him, tugging at every single string in his web to judge its relative strength, its distance, its many connections.

Jim nearly hung up on him then. 

He could smell the potatoes cooking in the kitchen, could heard his aunt rummaging around in cabinets.

“You’ll feel better when it’s over, honey. It'll be better,” he said softly. "That's the whole point." 

Then he did hang up, watched Sherlock register the disconnection with an inaudible curse. 

He switched his phone to silent before Sherlock could start calling again, closed the video streams, and with a feeling that he'd made an enormous mistake not hanging up sooner, drained the glass of whiskey and willed himself to forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this wasn't a disappointment after taking so, so long. Sorry about that!  
> Also, FYI: I think I'm coming to the end, after one or two more chapters. But also I kind of want to write a sequel, so stay tuned if you're interested.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Better 3 months late than never? I'm still not done though. Should be two more chapters. Really sorry this took so long. I'm still not completely happy with it.

Irene’s mobile rang uselessly against Sherlock’s ear. 

He turned his back to the camera.

He’d already allowed Jim to see more than enough of him; he’d brought another man into his room, into his bed, just to get his attention; he’d even begged him. And now he’d waited through 15 rings just to hear Jim’s voice speak cheerily in a pre-recorded message: “ _Sorry_ — The old Jim can’t come to the phone right now… Why? Becauuusse…” 

He drew out the last word, in just such a way, like he was scolding Sherlock specifically for asking an impertinent question; then the abrupt tone.

Sherlock nearly hurled the phone across the room. Jim’s irritating self-assurance. His recklessness, always playing, even at the edge of a cliff. And that certain tone of inscrutability that meant he was making a reference Sherlock didn’t understand. The receiver in front of his face, he shouted, “ _What does that even mean?!_ ” 

Anger. Frustration. His emotions were reverberating strangely inside him — sharply and slowly. His breathing was shallow as he curled an arm convulsively to the side of his head, blocking himself a bit more from the camera. He returned the receiver to his ear and forced calm into his voice. “Text me in an hour so I know you’re alive.” His voice barely shook when he added, “Please.” 

He hung up, pressed Irene’s phone to his forehead and felt like crushing it in his hand. This game - such as anything can be called a game when you’re barely given room enough to make a move - had started an anxious, frantic feeling under his skin - it was warm and burning and constant and his brain wouldn’t stop bouncing from one thing to the next and Jim _knew_ that. Jim _had to know that. He always_ knew _everything_. 

_Please._ He could barely stand the embarrassment. That he’d said it more than once now. And they both knew how rare it was for him to say it at all, least of all at times like this, when Jim wasn’t even touching him, when it actually counted.

 

_Please what, Sherlock? Oh, just, generally ‘please’? Gosh, you’re so polite._

 

Jim’s voice in his head. Teasing. He’d never once let it go without comment. Not until recently. But now. Now Jim was what — he was ignoring it? Disinterested? Actually leaving?

Sherlock threw the phone across the room, unable to stop himself. It hit his headboard with a resounding _thunk_ ; a deep, satisfying sound. Release. It felt like release.

A second later he’d upended his nightstand. Loudly clattering objects and breaking glass. A lamp overturned in a wobbling series of hysterics, hindered by its cord. 

A bulb lit the room ominously from the ground, throwing long, dancing shadows against the wall. Then a loud crunch — the composite sound of breaking plaster and ripping wallpaper, and his fist was inside the wall.

Pain. A focus. It actually helped. Feeling numb, he pulled his hand free and took a step back. His heel caught the edge of a picture frame.

A photograph of John and Mary, Rosie as yet unborn. 

The break was contained, splintering the image; he set it carefully back atop the dresser. He chewed his lip and stared at it, wondering, not for the first time, if Mary had known. The extent to which he’d been compromised. As an afterthought he moved it to cover the pinprick of a camera lens embedded in a crack along the wall. 

He stood still, staring, on the brink of thought but still in the quiet of shock. He blankly brushed the curls from his eyes. A pointless act of vanity because Jim couldn’t see him anyway. He felt cold at the thought. Strangely empty. An emptiness with no echo, no sound. He’d long since convinced himself it was merciful, to let Jim watch him from time to time, to give him that small comfort. But maybe it was self-indulgent. Maybe he’d only made things worse.

Jim’s eyes on the rooftop of St. Bart’s, looking so tired they’d become sincere.

Jim’s eyes staring into him as he pressed Sherlock’s knees against his chest, eyes like a warning he couldn’t interpret, melting by degrees into something soft and adoring, recognizable, then knowing, too knowing, dark and monstrous and _changed_ by the weight of it. 

Then Jim’s face hidden against Sherlock’s neck and Sherlock trembling with his eyes on the ceiling.

A phantom shudder ran through him and he reflexively, idiotically turned away from the obstructed camera. 

Jim whispering in his ear, something that should have been completely non-sexual but somehow wasn’t.

_That tobacco ash on the balcony — number 113. You posh boys leave such messes behind._

Sherlock’s body arching in response, reaching for him, for his neck, the base of his skull, his heels locking against his back, to urge him forward, to draw him deeper. 

Jim chuckling a bit, then whispering, in a voice like an inside joke.

_Tá mé i ngrá leat._

Sherlock’s hands were pressed to his head, then covering his face as he tried to push the memory back. He scoffed in frustration when his hands came away wet, when he realized he was crying again. And he _felt_ it shaking through his body - the euphoria of defeat. The certainty that he would lose, that it was just about _how much_ he would lose.

The crying was silent until it wasn’t, and then the broken sound that came out of him made him go red. 

His ears pricked up in the mortified silence that followed, listening for signs he’d been heard or not heard, hoping to god he was alone. It was enough to make him stop at least, blessedly.

He realized the entire flat was still, empty on the other side of the bedroom door, save the low warble of the television. 

Probably Felix had taken off at a full sprint the moment he realized no one was keeping him there. Thankfully, Sherlock had already lifted the last of the cocaine from him, a not even remotely difficult feat given how distracted he’d been, secreted away in the front pocket of his trousers (where John would never search). 

And it made sense for Irene to have gone. He’d expected her to disappear sooner than later, and now with her friend evidently in danger, or at the very least doing a questionable job…

Turning it over and shifting nervously from foot to foot, he realized the only one whose silence he couldn’t immediately explain was John’s.

He chewed his lip and glanced at the broken picture frame. He wiped his eyes and paced into the living room, bare arms hugged to his body, feeling suddenly cold, very cold.

It was as empty as it sounded — just the low volume of the television. 

With nothing else to immediately occupy him, he moved in front of it. 

Still the explosion was on the news. The footage wasn’t live. It seemed to be on a loop, so there wasn’t anything new to be gained, and there was no new information being shared with the public. Such ham-handed work though, it stood to reason there would be evidence, something to tip off the police about the dead bodies’ true connections, even if those leads weren’t being shared with the public. And Jim’s orders, if he knew him at all, had been to kill all five targets in secret. The fact that it hadn’t gone to plan meant the others in Jim’s employ would now be panicking, which meant killing Sylvester Reeves would now be a very difficult task to achieve. 

Which could all work in Sherlock’s favor if he could just get his mind to cooperate. 

Disgusted with himself and his own limitations, he switched the television off. His fingers were in his front pocket, already reaching for the cocaine.

Then, sounds on the pavement below caught his attention. He moved to the window. John’s voice — giving instructions about Rosie. 

He pulled the curtains aside. Dense fog in his immediate vision. The outline of Mrs. Hudson’s car near the curb below. He could see John, with Rosie on one hip, moving bags from the street corner to the car, whose engine was already alive and humming. 

Eventually, Rosie went the way of the bags.

“And drive slow, for God’s sake, this damned weather.” John’s voice drifting up before the car eased onto Baker street and away. 

When John turned back toward 221B, Sherlock quickly glanced at the mirror to check his eyes. More pink than red; obviously not ideal for a conversation he didn’t want to have anyway. 

He put more space between himself and the doorway as he listened to John’s heavy, long-suffering footsteps come up to the flat.

At last John’s energy, like that of an unhappy solicitor, filled the entryway.

John just stood there for a brief moment, staring toward Sherlock in evident exhaustion. 

Then he put out a hand and said, “Your phone. Give me your phone.”

Sherlock jumped slightly. He’d been expecting a reprimand, not a demand. 

“I’m — I’m sorry?” he asked.

John was keeping his eyes low, never quite making eye contact. “I’ve just packed my daughter off to my sister’s because I think your boyfriend, the mass murderer, will probably blow up our flat, or all of London, or just me specifically — so give me your goddamn phone, please, Sherlock. Now, so I can see what you’ve been lying about,” he said. He was modulating his voice. He was evidently struggling to remain civil.

No other immediate plan occurred to him, just a jumble of expectations and certainties. With a dry swallow, he stepped closer, curls cast over his eyes as he dug in his pocket for the mobile, hanging his head in a vague mimicry of guilt. The guilt a normal person would feel.

From a slight angle, he watched John contemplate a locked screen. There was no time to be embarrassed. John’s train of thought was already there and he could at least attempt to distract him.

“You’re thinking I faked my death for him. You’re wrong. I did think he was dead at first, too.”

John glanced up sharply. For a moment Sherlock thought he’d succeeded, had distracted him with his own emotional turmoil about Reichenbach.

“You weren’t actually — Sherlock, were you _crying_?” John asked. There was an edge to his voice, under the incredulity, something familiar, something that reminded Sherlock of his time at university; it made him turn away sharply.

He muttered, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and wandered to the mantel, still feeling John’s eyes on him as he went. 

He regretted spending his time alone so unwisely, regretted not changing his shirt at least, regretted how strung-out and desperate he both looked and felt, that the fingers on his right hand were getting very stiff, that a bruise was definitely forming over his knuckles. 

John sounded amused by the denial when he spoke again. “Yeah, I have a baby, Sherlock.” He was barely muffling a laugh. “I do actually know what crying looks like.”

Sherlock didn't answer, just continued facing away. Maybe it counted as a success. Maybe he could count it as a success that John was now going to mock him for a few seconds rather than worry about the phone.

John verbalized it, at long last. “Christ, of course sex made you this confused. After waiting so long. Of course it did.”

Sherlock flinched. The hair on his neck was standing on end.

“Give me the password,” John said.

“No,” Sherlock answered quickly. He tugged at the bottom edge of his shirt. In the mirror, he could see John was pinching the bridge of his nose, going a little bit pink. This wouldn’t be mockery then. This would be anger. Rage.

There wasn’t long to wait. Sherlock closed his eyes before it started. The fury in John’s voice shook the room.

“How fucking _dare you_ try to hide —” he stopped mid-sentence, then started again, slightly more contained. “Sherlock, people have _died_ , people are going to die because of your —Your _boyfriend_ — _God, I don’t even think you understand_! This is so much worse than anything else you’ve ever done, Sherlock. I mean, do you even understand that?!”

Sherlock opened his eyes when he sensed it was done. The skull was staring straight back at him. 

“Rarity. 727489,” he said evenly.

John huffed and wandered slightly away to cool off, to get himself back in hand, as he typed in the password.

Sherlock steeled himself as best he could for his privacy being violated. There would be more of it, from the tabloids, and probably soon. He would have to find a way to disguise how sick it made him feel.

“In case you’re unaware, you have a broken rib?” John was reading from the most recent conversation he could find on Sherlock’s phone, making it a question.

Sherlock cleared his throat. He turned slightly and gave John a tight, indulgent smile. “Yes. I saw him last night. Briefly.” He stood up straighter, his nails digging into his palm as he did so. “Did I not mention that?”

John threw him a glare and then squinted back at the screen. He kept reading. “‘In case you’re unaware, you’re a drug addict.’ Then - ‘I told you so’? And a kiss? ‘Call Irene right now if you want this to stop’?” His voice sounded increasingly mystified as he read on. He raised his eyes to Sherlock again, but now in confusion. He looked like a child presenting a broken toy, asking wordlessly for an explanation.

Sherlock felt cold; he felt like he might actually vomit. “It’s — it would be difficult to explain out of context,” he said, haltingly. He felt a blush rising in his cheeks. It wasn’t for John to know. It wasn’t any of his business. 

Then John began fumbling with the phone again, obviously pushing buttons; Sherlock moved quickly towards him. “What are you doing?”

John waved him back. “Checking your contacts. This can’t be the only number he’s used.”

Sherlock sighed in exasperation. “Yes, fine, I’ll save you the trouble - ‘Jim IT’ is him too. He slipped me his number when he was dating Molly.” He couldn’t help but hover, though he knew it was hurting his chances of getting his phone back, of remotely controlling what John did with it. 

“Yeah, I was — ” John answered absently before looking up. “Wait, do you not remember I was there?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes and decided definitely not to engage further with that. Because no, frankly, he didn’t remember. He just remembered Jim’s body, somehow not Jim yet, not yet riveting or exhilarating but not yet terrifying either, flirting with him shamelessly and showing his underwear. It was an image he’d re-examined a million times, an image that was painfully incomplete due to how little attention he’d actually been paying at the time, that was now exaggerated to the point of pain due to how much attention he’d paid to it after the fact, after it was already too threadbare, too poor a recreation. 

He ran a hand through his hair and glanced at the mirror over the mantel. He turned and paced to the window, every inch of distance from his phone felt like a yard, but he had to control himself.

The entire view, windows, buildings opposite, rooftops and the rest of London were still overlaid in fog. The street below stood empty. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Running late then. The weather. That would be due to the weather.

“I organized his numbers by country code,” Sherlock said with a sigh, because he could hear John realizing ‘Jim IT’ was a dead end. “Any contact named for a country is him.” 

In the quiet that followed, he began chewing his lower lip.

It took longer than it should have, with that precise information, but then John was rather bad at operating technology. 

“‘Sweetheart,’” John read, finally; then he stopped dead like he’d been burned. He took a sharp breath. “Sweetheart? He calls you sweetheart.” 

Despite himself, Sherlock smirked. If that one word embarrassed him, John was in no way equal to the task he’d set himself. At least this would be painful for both of them.

John went on reading. “‘If you asked me for help, I would help you.’ Dot dot dot. Yeah, how nice of him,” he grumbled.

“Germany,” Sherlock said aloud, speaking for his own benefit alone. He recognized the conversation as one they’d had shortly after he shot Magnussen. 

His eyes were still cast outside and down as John read him his response, which he knew perfectly well. “‘Stop calling me that and I know.’ Then he said… ‘If you think I don’t see you subtweeting me.’ Dot dot dot. Some symbol…” 

“It’s a face rolling its eyes. He uses Irene’s twitter account from time to time. TheWhipHand. You can always tell it’s him by the punctuation,” he explained quickly, rubbing at a twinge in his brow as he did so, fairly certain John wasn’t listening anyway. Finally, the fog below was occluded by a large, black car, pulling to a stop.

Dimly, Sherlock could hear John reading again, but he was busy doing calculations in his head.

“‘If you overdose. I’ll mourn you very violently,’” John read, sounding chilled by the words. “‘Very. Violently. So, you know. Weigh that into your process,’” he broke off and swallowed. Sherlock knew he’d skipped over another of Jim’s endearments when he continued. “Then seven broken hearts and a knife? Jesus, Sherlock.”

“Mm,” Sherlock answered, largely disinterested, focused instead on the imminent arrival of their visitor.

He waited until he heard Mycroft’s even footsteps on the landing below. Then he said brightly, as if he’d just remembered something, “John. Don’t look at Macedonia.”

John was silent for too long after that and Sherlock smiled; he’d clearly taken the bait. 

“I—” John started, then he stopped again. He had an odd expression on his face when Sherlock turned his head. His eyes were closed and he was holding the phone some distance from his body. “Did I just… Did I just see—” he was spluttering.

Sherlock moved like a shot. He snatched the phone from John’s extended hand and slid to the opposite side of the chair. “Moriarty’s penis?” he asked as he came to a stop. “I would expect so.”

“Sherlock!” John shouted. “You’d goddamn better—”

He was cut off by an umbrella tapping loudly against the ground. 

Mycroft was standing in the doorway, glancing between the two men with an expression of extremely limited indulgence. 

John cleared his throat and took a step back.

“Ah, brother mine,” Sherlock said vaguely, watching John fold into himself. Now with an audience, he was already forcing down the impulse to attack.

Sherlock glanced at Mycroft, who never went this long without shaving, who smelled of dried blood, burnt flesh and formaldehyde; whose trousers bore the creases of transit. Two crime scenes and even the morgue. And yet he’d returned here.

“Was there traffic?” he asked as he quickly changed the password on his phone. He checked the time. Forty-seven minutes since he’d asked Jim to text him in an hour. Begged. Since he’d begged him.

Mycroft inclined his head slightly, the exhaustion even more evident when he tried to move with his usual composure. He answered with a sigh, “Among other pressing matters, yes, Sherlock, there was traffic.” 

He leaned his umbrella against the wall and went about the task of removing his coat.

“Well. Go on then. You’re here becaaauuse…” Sherlock drew out the last word. He heard James in his own voice.

While he waited for Mycroft’s answer, which of course he already knew, he sent a text.

_This phone. Text me here. SH_

With his phone out, he quickly ran a few google searches. 

He was aware, as he began narrowing his search, that Mycroft was walking closer. He expected him to stop and take a seat in John’s chair. He glanced up in shock when he realized his brother was actually coming closer to _him_ , interrogating his face, his arms, his knuckles, his shirt, like he was surveying one of his antiques for a subtle defect.

“My God, Mycroft, what—” Sherlock started, stepping back and away, stuffing the phone in his pocket as he went and banging his elbow ungracefully against the fireplace. He threw out a hand to steady the skull as it rolled in place.

“Oh, Sherlock. Brother.” Mycroft began, pity practically vibrating from him. 

Ruffling again under scrutiny, and this time his brother’s, Sherlock turned towards the kitchen. With his feet on the tile, he felt like an animal being corralled. He turned back as abruptly as he’d spun away.

“Oh, what does it _matter,_ Mycroft!” he shouted. 

Everything grated, every movement was slow and every thought took a million years. He sighed and scraped a hand through his hair. A worryingly large part of him felt like tearing it out.

“So I’m capable of experiencing a basic physical reaction! Is that really so alarming that it takes precedence _now_?” 

Feeling the rush of irritation like a salve, he took another step towards his brother, daring him to make an outright deduction. “Oh, yes, what else do you see, brother? That I’m still a bit high, but it’s long since stopped being enjoyable? That I broke half the things in my room, and that this is… well, this is someone else’s shirt? None of it matters. Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to remind me to see the bigger picture instead of getting lost in irrelevant details? Or has your mind been so degraded by embarrassment at not having seen what was blatantly in front of your face—”

“ _The bigger picture_ , brother mine,” Mycroft interrupted, now finally with a bit of wry rebuke to his tone. 

Sherlock swallowed the rest of his insult. He closed his eyes and nodded, then turned away again. Rebuke was vastly preferable to the tone of pity at least. He pressed his lips together and paced further into the kitchen. He busied his hands putting on the kettle. 

He could hear John take a seat on the coach. He heard him sigh unhappily. In defeat, he was at his most helpful. It was practically his battle stance.

There was a stretch of silence before Mycroft cleared his throat and said, “I expect Miss Adler’s made her final exit by now.”

“Not final,” Sherlock said shortly, though Mycroft clearly hadn’t been addressing him.

He’d arranged the tea tray, his hands shaking less and less with use. The pair in the living room were evidently finding it difficult to converse with him so near. They hadn’t said so much as another word by the time he brought the tray to the living room and set it on the coffee table, so he just continued where he’d left off. “Though she _will_ now prove impossible to follow, which I suppose was your actual meaning.”

“Sherlock,” John shook his head warningly, eyes cast down again. Despite the unwelcoming tone, Sherlock took a seat in his own chair.

John shifted, first uncomfortably, then with an aim of facing Mycroft. It was a visible act of deference. He was waiting for Mycroft to disinvite Sherlock from the investigation, once again. 

Sherlock’s eyes shifted from John to Mycroft, not in deference but in defiance. He drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair.

Mycroft met Sherlock’s eyes, unsurprised by the behavior of his little brother. He uncrossed his legs and sat up, somehow, even straighter than he’d been sitting before. 

Then, with an air of intentional anticlimax, he leaned calmly forward to prepare his tea. His eyes still on the moving spoon and saucer, he said, “You must have worked out, as I have, that James Moriarty is within two hours of the city while not being in the city.”

John grumbled, “Oh for fuck’s sake,” as Sherlock answered, “Obviously.”

Sherlock’s eyes shifted to John for half a second before answering his brother further, “And you must have worked out that he's destroying his own web.” 

“Of course,” said Mycroft, though a bit of surprise was clear enough on his face, probably at the realization Sherlock was willing to share information.

“And that consequently he’s _very_ isolated at present,” Sherlock added, bitterness sneaking into his tone despite his best efforts to sound dispassionate. “And again consequently,” he went on, interrupting Mycroft's attempt to respond. “You must have concluded, quite correctly, that now is the best chance you’ll ever have to catch him. And I assume, _forgive me_ , but I assume that takes precedence over any further violence he may or may not but _definitely will_ imminently unleash.” The bitterness was still in his tone, and so intractable he could hardly tell where it was directed anymore.

Peripherally, Sherlock could see John patting his pockets. “I think Irene took my phone,” he said vacantly.

Sherlock nodded and spoke quickly, “I’d expect so. As Mycroft's no doubt painfully aware, she left hers behind.” He widened his eyes in Mycroft’s direction. “That is why you’re here, isn’t it, brother? Following her mobile signal? Or did you just come in the big car that seats four officers because you felt like spoiling yourself?”

Mycroft carefully set the spoon on the tray, sipped his tea, then offered Sherlock a diplomatic smile and a curt nod before saying, “Shall we turn our attention to you at long last, Sherlock? It’s been close to ten minutes, after all. What takes precedence _for you_ , little brother?”

Sherlock dropped his eyes briefly, his search for a convincing lie both obvious and pointless. Mycroft continued, “Can I assume it’s his safety?” 

Sherlock swallowed; his mouth felt like sand, so he simply nodded in response.

“Hm,” Mycroft said; Sherlock shifted in his seat when he realized it was all he planned to say, that his brother was now assessing him again, taking in everything. 

Sherlock ended up staring through him, simply waiting for it to stop, for Mycroft to see that the nightmares alone would destroy him if Jim was ever really _gone_ , that he’d fall into a worse relapse than he’d ever experienced, that it would be like losing his own shadow, that his own survival would have worse odds than a coin toss.

Whatever Mycroft saw in his face, he finally sat back in his seat, having at least temporarily suspended the search.

Sherlock jumped when he felt a vibration in his pocket. He fumbled to look at his phone.

 

_It’s not my fault you don’t know who Taylor Swift is, honey. I talk about her all the time. x_

 

Sherlock must have smiled while reading it. He certainly felt relief. The dubious relief of a temporary reprieve.

Opposite him, he heard Mycroft sigh unhappily and say, “I see."


End file.
